The door closes. Claire slumps against it, barring the way. The taste of seawater in her mouth rides her throat where the rage is so thick she needs her palm flat against her chest to catch her breath. Tears sting her blind eyes as she swims her way chair to chair to table to bed. Outside a car door slams, an engine coughs to life, and Nathan, she is certain, is pulling from the curb, untethered now, floating away downriver. She traces the fading hiss of tires until it is a single grain of noise in a night teeming with life, and Nathan is washed away, absorbed by the hordes. And still, after all this time, it is not her fault. The bastard. She didn't hear the baby go upright, or gurgle, or choke for that matter. He was clutching the blankets to his throat for warmth, his little shrunken shoulders bare. Claire had seen in his staring, beaded eyes two windows letting out on their future, the future something irrecoverable, lost along the way, or never found-
The blue snow-light moves across her, across her face in the mirror. She primps at her hair, fixing a smile of courage so she will not cringe, mouthing something while she put the baby's mouth to her breast, still sore and leaking with milk. But he didn't take, poor thing he couldn't grip the nipple, so she opened his mouth and dropped it in, whitening his tongue, the watery milk running sideways and down into the crevices underneath and gooing up the back of his throat, pooling in the little ditch between lip and gum. The throat didn't budge, the windpipe surprisingly tough but infuriatingly still. Drink, baby. She lay with him again on the bed, her nightie rolled to her waist like a life preserver, keeping her afloat while she tried one breast, then the other. The sky that early morning had been a gray, empty radiance, no kind of dawn. She turned the knob on the radio but when she found something she liked she clutched her face with her free hand and immediately began to cry, her tears running between her fingers. She didn't bother staying quiet because she didn't mind waking somebody, the faceless neighbors above her and below, their damn footsteps and the thudding bass of their music, damn Nathan, where was he while she pressed the baby to her lap, between her legs, maybe to get him back up there, start it all over again. Still sore from stitches, the delivery not the easiest, and the baby stone still in the leaching light-drink, baby, drink-already blue, already dead of everything and of nothing in particular. As if there was simply no room in this region for one more life, even this one innocent piece of Nathan in all this world.
Claire looks at her watch. Damn you, Errol, where are you?
All at once the dark gives, and the shadows belong to the false streetlamp dawn. Off the back of a chair hangs a white brassiere, her blue jeans. Claire collapses on her bed and reaches. On the bed stand a light clicks on. A half-gone glass of water. A book that will help her last perhaps until two or three.
As Santos lets himself in the front door of his mother's apartment he thinks he hears his name called somewhere by one of those headless voices that announce his fears. The windows are open. The curtains flutter like flags.
His mother waits at the kitchen table, seated among votive candles. She fingers a pewter picture frame, another gift from the Steins. Though he can see only the felt back, Santos knows whose face it contains.
"I can't help wondering what she was thinking about," she says. "Was she terrified, did she know? Did she feel the animal's claws around her neck? Did she fight?" Her spectacles wink in the light as she lifts her head. "Where have you been?"
Past supplying answers, Santos listens for evidence of others in the apartment but hears nothing and is grateful for their absence. Who knows what he knows? Who would have believed it could be true? He draws a deep breath. A kink has formed in his stomach and now takes the form of nausea. He feels as if he has just this night stumbled upon the misfortune of being a grown man who has in his life understood too little and trusted too much. Breathe, breathe: he feels more than ever as if his lungs are not deep enough. "Where are they?" he asks.
"Sonia is in her old room, the boys in yours. The others I sent away."
"You don't want company."
"There is nothing to talk about, unless you are here now to tell me they know who it was. Do they know?"
Santos sits. The teeth of flame shift and steady in their columns of glass.
"Go to Claire," she says. "You are more her husband than my son."
"We're not married, Momma."
"You should be."
"Did Claire come? Did she call?"
"And to be with her you divorced that poor girl, ruined her, a good Catholic. Claire was Nathan's, Milton's son's girl."
"I wasn't good enough?"
"She was never meant for you."
"She was no one's."
His mother lifts her chin with indignation, her mouth firm. "Isabel will always be more my daughter than your sister."
She says other things, old, bitter things, swinging at the countering claims of enemy apparitions.
"I saw Nathan," he says finally.
"He will miss Isabel," she says. "More than you."
"I'm sure. Maybe he has more reason to."
She turns her face on her son and he returns her stare.
"He told me," he says.
A flickering look of impatience in her face, then her mouth makes a move very like a smile.
Santos can feel the pressure behind his own face, something welling in back of his eyes, words, beliefs, memories. He says, "I want to know, is it true."
His mother rests the picture face down and drapes a hand across it.
He nods at the picture frame. "Did Daddy know?" his voice suddenly sounding to him too small for a man.
"He knew."
Whispering, "How did he stay? How did he stand him, Nathan, and his stories, and me, me and my trying so hard to be him?"
"Life is not clear, Errol," she says. "He of all people understood that."
"He. What do you know about clear? I've seen brothers decapitate brothers, mothers stab daughters, boys run over their fathers. It is not our instinct to avoid misery, but if you survive it's because that's what you've done. Let me tell you what was clear-Isabel's body wrapped in seaweed and shit, naked on a beach in front of bums and whores and strangers."
She looks up, hands trembling on the frame.
"You've dipped us in shit. Tell me after Isabel you stopped."
"How can I explain this to you? We had nothing. He gave us-"
"He gave you!" Santos roars, and here it is, the source of his own envy-what the Santoses had, what the Steins had-what they gave them. "Look at the shithole you live in, this crap neighborhood. The trinkets Milton Stein has given you over the years have only made this place more pitiful. It’s payoff. What he gave you, Momma? He gave it to you in his office, on the floor-“
“Errol-“
“I know him, I know what and I know where and I know how. He’s a legend, in case you didn’t know. Though of course you had to. You probably set up the rendezvous, his loyal private secretary. I always knew. I just didn’t, obviously, always know who.”
“My god."
"And I don't care. just say you stopped," he says. "After she was born. Can you say that?"
She says nothing.
"Then how many years? From when to when?" Santos cries. His fear has chased him down, cornered him. This too.
She is crying.
"What year to what year?" The knot in his stomach flying undone, the little pulse of air rising to his throat, "Please god tell me I'm not his."
She manages to motion no.
He reaches across the table and clutches her wrist. He raises it, her hand flopping like a puppet's. "Swear it," he whispers.
"I swear."
Dropping her hand, he considers her. "Can I believe you?"
She says, "What do you want to believe?"
"How do you know for sure?"
Fearful, her face awash, she raises a quivering finger. "Look at you."
He grabs for the picture frame and slides it out from under his mother's hands and sandwiches it protectively between his palms. "Look at me," he says. He turns the picture. His own face superimposed on his father's, feature for feature. He cannot conclude. Maybe. Christ, maybe. He can't be sure.