Jacki had the window side. On the door side, Jacki’s roommate was a woman who spoke right up. “Arrgh,” the roommate cried in greeting. “Crap! I hate my life!” Thin and pallid as a tubercular character in a novel, she had thrown her white sheets off and lay splayed like an automobile crash dummy, post-collision.
“Hey,” Kat said to her sister.
“Hey.” Jacki’s droopy blue eyes gazed at her. “I know you.”
Scared, Kat just took her hand. Her sister, for the past few months whale-sized, now appeared diminished, the sheet over her stomach collapsed like a fallen parachute. Where was the baby? Kat didn’t dare ask.
Raoul said, “She’s okay, Kat. Really.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“No time. I’m really sorry. It happened really fast, and then they operated-”
All the pent-up concern Kat had been repressing flooded out and she started crying. “Jacki! Boo hoo hoo.”
“Quit that. Ma always said you sound like a dying animal when you cry and it’s true,” Jacki said groggily. “Ow, Raoul, something hurts bad down by my right foot.”
“She’s doped up, Kat,” Raoul said, apologizing for Jacki’s crankiness. “Just woke up. I’ll get the nurse in here, honey.”
“They doped me up, hoping I won’t notice every freaking thing went wrong that could go wrong.”
Kat said nothing, just squeezed Jacki’s hand.
“Ouch,” Jacki said weakly.
“Sorry,” Kat said. “Tell me what happened.”
“I was crossing Sepulveda. Big street, so many cars. This-oh-so-L.A.-this stretch limo came out of nowhere. What I remember is the part where I rolled along the street like a bowling ball. Speaking of which-” She stared down at her stomach. “Oh, my God! Raoul! Our baby!” She clutched her husband.
Raoul bent down and kissed her forehead. He stayed there, cheek pressed to hers, and whispered, “Honey, you’re a mother.”
“We had-our baby? While I was sleeping?”
He nodded. “You went into labor after the accident, while they were setting your foot. Everything went fine. My brave girl. I love you.”
“The baby came?”
“A boy, sweetheart.”
Kat’s heart filled at the sight of the joy on her sister’s face.
“We have another boy in the family,” Jacki said. Tears glittered in the corners of her eyes. “I want him! Where is he? Bring him here, my darling. Oh, Raoul, a little boy.”
“We can pick a name finally. Anything besides my dad’s, okay?” Raoul said.
“Middle name Thomas.” Jacki tried to sit up, but she groaned immediately and fell back on the bed.
“Congratulations,” Kat said. She smoothed Jacki’s hair and kissed her, then hugged Raoul. “I have a nephew,” she said wonderingly. A new being with an intimate connection to her had sparked into existence when she wasn’t looking.
“But where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
“You need to rest. Are you ready to see him?”
“Please. I am.”
At Raoul’s request, the nurses brought the shriveled and squalling newborn to Jacki, tightly swaddled in a white hospital cotton blanket, a blue band decorating his skinny wrist. Jacki cried at the sight of him. She pulled the tightly wrapped blanket down, which made him cry, too, examining his extremities and genitals.
“They’re perfect,” she said. “Ten toes. Look, Kat. All good.”
“Perfect,” Kat agreed.
Wrinkled and of an alarmingly bright pink hue, he was mostly bald, but Kat was as mesmerized by his velvety pate as Jacki. She reached out a tentative hand and rested it on the downy head. His skin felt moist, warm, and pliant under her touch.
Rather efficiently, the baby found Jacki’s nipple and clamped on. “It might hurt a little at first,” said the nurse. “Of course, you’ll toughen up.”
“Look, Kat. What a beautiful child. Do you believe it?”
“Be glad he’s healthy even though he’s small,” said the nurse. “One lady tonight had a baby with heart problems. He’ll need an operation before he can go home.”
Jacki kissed the baby’s head gently, as if conferring a blessing. “Send her flowers! Send her money for a college education!”
Raoul held her and his son, all together in one big bundle. When Jacki nodded off at last, Kat and Raoul had a wonderful time holding and passing the bundle back and forth and drinking freely from a bottle of chilled champagne Raoul had scored somewhere. The baby slept calmly in his bassinet by the side of the bed, as if perfectly comfortable already with his new surroundings.
“You did it,” Kat said. “You gave me a nephew, Raoul. Thank you.”
He stroked the boy’s cheek, who instantly rooted, searching for a nipple, hoping for more. He sucked his father’s baby finger, temporarily mollified. “What if-imagine me raising him without her. Alone.”
“You would never be alone.”
“I hope that’s true.”
“I might not have the colostrum but I have the will. No harm will come to this one, not when I’m around.” Hearing the fierceness in her own voice made her almost embarrassed.
“I’ll go get us a pizza,” Kat said later. They ate, and Raoul slept, and Kat watched Jacki wake up twice to take pills and feed her little one. The nurses didn’t bother them much. The door was closed and the small, plain room with its medical equipment and sleepers felt as beautiful as the Taj Mahal.
When Jacki woke up again at almost four in the morning and began feeding her baby, Kat left, but not before Jacki had the last word, as usual.
“I wish you could have this feeling,” she said wistfully, “that life goes on, and it’s good.”
She would admit to silver linings, Kat thought, punching the elevator button, new muscles, new life.
Kat had told Ray to pick her up at her work at nine-thirty that evening, but she wasn’t there. Ray missed her. He wanted to talk to her, had been holding on so that he could talk to her.
He looked at his watch again. Too late. She had abandoned him. This pressure in his chest-he had brought the tapes to play for her. They radiated on the seat beside him. He gave up and turned on the ignition, the infernal sound that punctuated all their days and nights.
Ray arrived at Memory Gardens in Brea after the sun sank, the great gardens of the cemetery, their grasses and plaques, immutable no matter what the light. The marker for Henry Jackson reposed in the crematorium. “How we miss him,” the simple script read, then showed dates of his birth and death, the death date close to Ray’s second birthday.
He didn’t believe that death date anymore. His father had died later; he was beginning to feel pretty sure about it.
She hadn’t loved his father. He was beginning to understand why, at last.
He wondered why Esmé had bothered with this memorial marker. She had told Ray his father’s ashes had been scattered by his great-aunt in New York. Maybe she had put it there for him, with a fake death date. She had told him about it years ago, but he couldn’t remember ever coming here with her. Ray had come a few times on his own, during those times when he felt the great pressure about the moves.
She was only trying to protect me, he thought, but I’m a man now. The lying becomes another kind of poison.
He put a bundle of tulips near the marker because there was no place for flowers. He had bought them at a florist just past the off-ramp, bright shiny green leaves with soft curling white flowers at the centers.
“I brought these,” he told the marker, “because it’s a celebration. You’re dead, safely dead, and that’s a blessing, it seems.” He hadn’t cared about his own kid enough to let him grow up in peace. Why had his father terrorized them? Sexual jealousy? He imagined he could guess. He couldn’t let go of a wife, felt insulted when she rejected him. He felt enraged.
Just like Ray had felt when Leigh cheated on him.