The Possibilities

by Kaui Hart Hemmings

  “Arches.”

  “How tall are you?”

  “Five five.”

  “Your eyes are green. Cully’s were blue.”

  “Blue genes,” she says. “Ha, get it? Blue jeans. Oh, and I can roll my tongue.”

  “You knew what I was doing?” I automatically roll my tongue. “Of course you did.”

  What happens to the recessive gene? I wonder. Where does it go? Does it get masked by the dominant gene but still travel unchanged? I’d like to think that everything surfaces eventually, everything gets its due.

  I’m thinking of Seth for some reason. I wonder where he is now. I’d like to think that he’s a good man; that moment shouldn’t define him.

  “Was he good to you?” I ask.

  She looks back at me with a secret sort of smile. “He was.”

  “But you didn’t love him,” I say. “It didn’t get to that.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “I felt like I did, but you know—endorphins, oxytocin.”

  “Sure,” I say, not knowing exactly what she’s talking about but getting it. She’s talking about being caught in the moment, that web of chemicals, drugging you into thinking that what you have is cosmic. I flew with Billy, absolutely flew.

  “But now you’ll always love him,” I say.

  She looks confused, then seems to understand. He is frozen in time now. He can do no wrong. He will always be easy to love.

  “I will,” she says, and I wonder if it’s for my benefit. After my mom died, my dad would check in with me, always assuming I was quiet because I was thinking about her. Most of the time I wasn’t, but for his benefit I’d pretend my thoughts were on her. I wanted him to stop checking in with me, stop assuming I was unhappy. It made me feel guilty that I wasn’t.

  A surprise spring of tears floods my vision. My mom, Cully—this loss of life, this beautiful hotel, this beautiful girl. None of it makes sense. Part of me wants to jump off the balcony. Part of me wants to sing from it. I love and hate this life.

  “You don’t want to do this.” I place my hand in the middle of my chest. “Offer me this. I was such a bad mother. I didn’t keep him safe. That’s all I had to do. I didn’t do anything right.” I fan my face, shake it off.

  “That’s not true,” she says, and her voice is loud in the narrow hallway before the door. We are standing so close to each other.

  “You don’t know. You don’t know how I’d be. Plus I’m old and—”

  “You’re not old, but if you don’t want it—”

  “I’m not saying that, I’m thinking out loud, I’m—”

  Someone knocks on the door. “Who’s that?” I ask, stupidly suspicious.

  “I don’t know,” she says. She looks through the peephole. “Billy and Lyle.”

  I adjust my strapless bra, then quickly turn to Kit and grin. “Do I have anything in my teeth?”

  “No,” she says. “Do I?”

  She bares her teeth. “No,” I say.

  I open the door and Billy looks surprised to see me.

  “Oh, hi,” he says. He looks back at my father. “We didn’t know you’d be here.”

  I’m confused but figure they assumed Kit would come along tonight.

  “Ladies, you look beautiful,” Billy says.

  “Thank you,” we both mumble.

  I wonder if Cully had the same effect on Kit that Billy once had, or maybe still has, on me.

  “Well?” he asks. “What about me? Don’t I clean up nice?”

  “Very nice,” Kit says. “You too, Lyle.”

  My dad, in black jeans and a checkered collared shirt, looks so dapper I feel proud. I grin at the idea of him and Billy sharing their frilly room, and I long for Cully right then, to complete it all: my boys in their Little Women–like quarters. I see the faces he’ll never attain. Cully and my dad both have that exaggerated, almost malleable face. They both could do so much with their faces—they could make the goofiest expressions.

  They walk down the hall, both patting their pockets. We trail behind them, then my dad stops in front of the door that must be Suzanne’s.

  I knock and she comes out as if she has been waiting right behind the door this whole time. One of her best qualities is punctuality.

  “Hi,” she says, and seems almost ashamed of something.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Nothing, just a little nervous for tonight.”

  Her uneasiness makes me feel like I should be anxious too, but all I feel is self-conscious, like I’m about to perform.

  Billy and my dad walk ahead. Billy’s gait is somewhat pigeon-toed and broken, like that of a retired football player. He looks back at me and winks and I flap my eyes in attempted response. I know him too well to flirt.

  We reach the elevators and wait. We all look at ourselves in the reflection of the doors, and when one opens and we all step in, we do it again—look at this grouping, first in the gold-framed mirror on the wall, then, after turning, in the reflection in the doors. The walls are padded in a satiny material that makes me think we’re in a high-class sanatorium.

  I look up at the mirror on the ceiling, the cluster of us, and go over the sequence of events that brought us here—my returning to work, Kit’s happening upon the show, linking me to Cully. Has it only been two days that I’ve known her? My dad rocks on his heels. I see him elbow Kit.

  “How you doing, sport?” he says. “Give me a factoid.”

  “When squirrels mate, the males will chase each other through the trees,” she says. “They jump from branch to branch, showing off for just one female. She’ll choose the one she thinks is the strongest.”

  My dad and Kit have a rhythm too, a closeness brought to us all courtesy of Cully, courtesy of his death. I’m nervous about what the next step in the sequence will be. Before I look down, I see my dad look over Kit’s head at Billy and swear I see him nod, as if giving Billy a kind of go-ahead.

  “I was listening to NPR the other day,” Billy says.

  “You were?” I say.

  “A story about an actor who feels he needs nine months to get into a role. ‘My character needs to gestate,’ the actor said. ‘I need to live with him for a while before he can be brought to life. Before he can be born.’ He said it just like that.”

  I wait to see where he’s going with this. The elevator door opens, but it’s not our floor and no one gets in.

  “So nine months,” he says. “That’s a long time.” Billy looks around at all of us.

  “Great segue, Bill,” I say. Kit looks embarrassed, as she should. “God, is this why you came to her room? You thought you’d give her a little lecture without me there?”

  “Would you stay here the whole time?” Billy asks Kit, ignoring me. “Or would you want to be near home?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” she says.

  “But you’re going to tell your parents,” Billy says. “You can’t really hide something like this.”

  She looks to my dad, maybe because he has been so quiet. He’s letting her speak, of course. I feel trapped and conned. And we’re in an elevator.

  “We’re in an elevator,” I say, right when the doors open.

  “And now we’re out,” Suzanne says. She has been so quiet too, for Suzanne. “These are good questions.”

  “Sarah hasn’t told me what she wants to do yet,” Kit says, leading the way.

  I catch a flicker of amusement on Billy’s face. It’s annoying how good-looking he is. Back when we were together I always felt honored to be with him but also unsure, like it was a big joke on me.

  “Sport,” my dad says, but that’s all he says. He knows me. So does Billy. They know I can’t let him go again.

  We walk out into the grand room with its high ceilings and endless details. Every inch of space seems labored upon.

  “I’m hardly one to give advice or, you know, provide any kind of counsel.” Billy waves a hand, indicating his inadequacies. “You are doing a
very noble thing,” he says. “But before you decided to do this, before you met Sarah, you weren’t going to have the baby, right?”

  She nods. We continue to walk together with purpose and I get an image of us strutting like a gang, Reservoir Dogs–style, but on the Titanic.

  “And you’re okay delivering your baby, giving your baby away, and having your child exist in the world,” my dad says. “Your child.”

  “What are you asking?” Kit says, quite forcibly. “What do you want to know?”

  My dad hits his thigh with the palm of his hand as if Kit has finally said something right. We all stop walking and pause before the glass doors that lead outside. “We just thought you could talk this one out a little more,” he says. “Everything is happening very quickly. We thought we could slow down.”

  “We?” I say. “What is all this ‘we’ shit again?”

  “And how is this helpful for me to talk about this kind of stuff with strangers? With strange men? It’s my body!” Kit adds, ridiculously. We all give her outburst a moment of silence.

  “We didn’t concoct some sort of scheme,” Billy says. “We’re just on the same page.”

  “Billy and I have always been on the same page,” my dad says. “He’s the son I’ve never had.” He reaches behind me and hits Billy on the head.

  “Ow,” Billy says.

  “You’re a champion, Billy,” my dad says.

  “You are,” Billy says.

  “You guys are total morons,” I say. “You can’t bring up this traumatic stuff, then goof off like . . .”

  “Total featherbrains!” Kit says, and I almost laugh because I’ve never heard her yell so much—and what kind of an insult is “featherbrains”?—but she’s completely serious.

  “Sorry,” Billy says. “I know this is an absurd situation, that it’s very personal, and we’re here in this lovely . . . place.” We all look around at the well-dressed people in the room. A faint throb of music comes from one of the surrounding rooms. Everything harkens back to a time when people had the same problems yet used a different language. I imagine Kit in a gown, dwarfed by one of these long-backed chairs, the menfolk counseling her.

  “We thought you could use strangers,” my dad says, “even though I think we’re past that now, aren’t we? We’re friends, we’re like family.” I cringe at the word even though it’s the very one I was thinking of.

  “We want to help,” my dad says.

  “You’re all strangers,” she says, looking around at each of us.

  “I don’t mean to upset you,” Billy says. “We don’t. We just wanted you to be able to talk freely, to think this through.”

  She looks straight ahead. Suzanne edges up to her. “Maybe she has thought this through.”

  “I’m not telling you to do one thing or the other,” Billy says. “No one is. I just wanted to make you feel good about the other scenario too. Women do it. Girls who aren’t ready. Girls have abortions.”

  “Jesus, Billy,” I say, looking around at what I take to be college students, many of whom are uncomfortably striking, heading into the room with the music. Are kids prettier and taller these days?

  “Let me tell you something,” Suzanne says. “You know who almost got scraped?”

  It takes me a second to figure out what she means. “Good God,” I say.

  “Cher,” she says. Her eyes widen and she tugs her pants up. “Her mother came this close to getting rid of her.” She holds her thumb and pointer finger together like she’s holding a joint. “I think it was Cher, but that boy—I know that for sure. That football player who won the Heisman? His mother came forward and said she considered an abortion and now look. Look what he’s done, what these people have done. Frances Bean. That’s another one.”

  “Who?” we all ask.

  “Frances Bean Cobain. Courtney Love’s daughter.”

  I look around in disbelief.

  “I guess we know what you would do then,” Billy says. “You would want Morgan to have a child right now.”

  “Right after her senior year,” I say.

  “It wouldn’t be my preference,” Suzanne says, “but of course I would. Billy? Your daughter?”

  “Hell no,” he says. “She’s fourteen! If she was Kit’s age, I still wouldn’t want her to.”

  “Well, Morgan is the last Birckhead,” Suzanne says. “The last of my bloodline. My brother has a kid, but he’s adopted. I mean, I love him and he’s family, but not blood. We are the last Birckheads. That’s it! The end of the line.” She looks at me wide-eyed like I need to raise my arms up against this, the extinction of the Birckheads!

  “I’m pretty sure the adopted kid counts,” Billy says, but Suzanne runs over this comment.

  “This child could be the last of your line,” she says, moving her gaze around to include all of us. I feel this is the closing statement and that it should have more impact on me than it does. Do I not care enough about my line? Might I when the clouds clear and I can see and feel again? I think of my roots going back to those hollow-eyed men with long, white goatees, the dance hall owners, the schoolteachers, Revett and his dredge boat. They’ll all still be dead no matter what happens to us, and at this moment I feel no allegiance.

  My dad looks hooked on a looping thought. “Who the hell is Frances Bean?” he asks.

  Billy mumbles to me, “And who cares if Cher had never been born? Or the football player. The last Birckhead? Fuckin’ A.”

  Kit catches the last of this and doesn’t react. She looks focused, as though she’s about to run across a mat and do a triple backflip before a room full of judges.

  “Listen,” Billy says. “Yeah it’s hard and it sucks and there could be regret and it’s a tough decision and some people do have the babies and it all works out and great, we have Cher, blah blah, and so on.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Kit says, with no emotion. It makes me feel like we’re all completely unraveling, and yet the annihilation of composure is almost relaxing.

  “This is a ridiculous place to have this conversation,” Suzanne says.

  “Every place is,” I say.

  “Girls have abortions,” Billy says.

  “Oh my God, stop it.” I look around at passersby. The statement out there alone is laughably absurd, and yet none of us can laugh, right? Our eyes wander carefully over to one another.

  “So they make a mistake, but then they move on,” Billy says. “They go back to high school or college or whatever. The path of their lives stays relatively the same. They just go on, go forward. Get degrees, go to keg parties or grad school, get married, have kids . . . later.”

  “Is that what I’d do?” Kit says, her voice hard, mocking, which is good, I realize. We are like stand-ins for her parents, challenging her.

  “I don’t know,” Billy says, the fire in him dwindling. “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Cully wasn’t a mistake,” Suzanne says. “You don’t regret him.”

  “Of course not,” Billy says.

  My dad leans forward and we all move closer, as if in a huddle. “But this isn’t their story, Suze.” Billy nods vigorously, as if reminded where he was going.

  “Kit,” my dad says, “you need to know what you want. That’s the point of all this. Don’t leave it up to my daughter. It’s generous, what you’re doing and all, but at the same time, it isn’t. It isn’t fair.”

  I look at my father and feel young, protected. I briefly look at Billy and understand now their method. Both Billy and my father are trying to rescue me.

  “I guess that’s all we’re getting at,” Billy says.

  “You don’t need to speak for me,” I say to my dad. You don’t need to rescue me. He looks at me with surprise and what seems like worry, and then the expression hardens.

  “Very well,” he says. “Now, would there be some sort of contract or plan?” he asks. “There are legal matters. The child would have to be adopted.”

  When he says this, a wave of fati
gue hits me. There is so much involved in this, so much to do.

  “Guys?” Suzanne says. She keeps looking over at the nearest ballroom. “We should go in now. To the . . . thing.”

  She looks strange, near tears and truly apologetic.

  “Well, let’s go then,” I say.

  “I’m . . . I’m so sorry,” Suzanne says again.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “We’ll talk later. Or not.”

  “No, it’s just that tonight—I don’t think it’s going to be what it was supposed to be.”

  We walk with Suzanne toward the ballroom. “I was helping Morgan earlier with setting up and didn’t quite understand the theme of this party. I guess to get funding, her sewing club has to put on their normal fashion show, which happens here this time of year. Every year. And Morgan’s directing this year, so she thought she’d . . . I don’t know what she thought. I kind of said something, in my way, and Morgan snapped my head off. I’m just so sorry. All these Saab hippies—”

  “Do you know when they mate,” my dad says, “they jump from branch to branch.”

  We all pause at the doorway of the ballroom.

  “Whoa,” Kit says.

  “You weren’t kidding,” my dad says.

  I take in the dimly lit room. Chairs have been set up on both sides to face a cleared space down the center. Club-like music is playing.

  “This is Cully’s memorial?” I ask.

  “I think we’re about to watch a fashion show,” my dad says.

  I watch a man across the room slip a shrimp into his mouth.

  “She says it will be dedicated to him,” Suzanne says.

  “Just what he would have wanted,” Billy says.

  “I am so sorry,” Suzanne says. “I don’t know why she had to hide it this whole time. Why tell me there’s going to be a celebration for Cully? Why make you guys come all this way?”

  My dad puts his arm around her. “It’s fine. Whatever this is.”

  “There’s food,” she says. “And wine.”

  Part of me feels comforted that her child is disappointing her. Both pride and displeasure in one’s children seem to make mothers bond.

  “Cully was going to come,” I say. “It’s perfect that we’re here.”

  “What do you mean?” Suzanne says.