by W E DeVore
Then, nothing.
Kria: The Tearing
It was dark. Too dark. Her body was eerily still. The constant movement to which she’d grown accustomed over the last few months was gone. Q tried to lower her hands towards the comfort of her stomach, but found that she couldn’t. Her left hand rested against her chest and she couldn’t raise it. Solid, calloused hands held her right hand uncomfortably tight, pinching her fingers together, and she couldn’t find the strength to wiggle free of their grasp.
A bellows focused air in and out of itself to her right. Her mouth refused to move, locked in place to hard plastic that pressed painfully against her tongue.
Whispering chanting in a low voice nearby tempted her back to sleep, “Ana El na, refa na lah. Ana El na, refa na lah. Bevakashah, al tiqakh otah mameni. Bevakashah, tite'oreri. Bevakashah, ahuvati. Ani ohev otakh. Ani ohev otakh. Bevakashah, tite'oreri.”
She opened her eyes and they closed against her will. She fought to raise her eyelids again for several minutes. When she could finally focus her vision, she glanced around at her surroundings and discovered she was in something of a glass cage. The hallway outside was brightly illuminated, making her squint against the fluorescent lights.
Blinking away the bright fractals obscuring her vision, she looked down at her stomach and found it much too flat. A tear trickled over her cheek as terror clawed at her insides.
Oh, god. Where’s the baby?
Sanger’s face appeared above her. His normally tamed curls hung in a wild halo around his head and a dark purple bruise smudged the smooth skin beneath each of his storm grey eyes. She’d never seen his outer calm so completely abandon him and it flooded her stomach with icy panic.
This is bad.
“Clementine. Oh, Baruch HaShem. You’re awake,” he said, his voice breaking. His hand smoothed her hair back. “Don’t try to speak. You still have a breathing tube in. Oh, my god, you’re awake. Can you hear me?”
He wiped his eyes with his palm and returned to stroking her hair with unnerved force. She tried to reach up to him, only to discover that her left arm was bound to her chest, immobilized. She strained to move her other hand and realized his were the strong hands holding it. She squeezed his hands once.
Ben.
She squeezed twice.
Baby.
His face winced in pain. “I’m so sorry, Clementine.”
She began to tremble, listening to the steady beep, beep, beep of her own heart speed up on the monitor as arctic fright washed over her.
He cupped her face in his hand to hold her head still, bending down until his forehead touched hers. He focused his eyes on hers and calmed his voice to a whisper, “Stop, Clementine, please. You need to stay calm and listen to me. You were shot. Three times. Once in your left shoulder. Once in your right leg. Once in your stomach. You went into labor. You’ve lost a lot of blood. The bullet ruptured your placenta when it went through your uterus. Your heart stopped for ten minutes. You’ve been unconscious for three days. They weren’t sure if you’d wake up.”
Baby.
She squeezed his hand hard and Sanger grimaced. “You had a son. His lungs weren’t ready. He was strong though. He held on for three days, but….”
Baby.
Tears flooded Sanger’s eyes and his hand trembled against her cheek. “He didn’t make it. He died this morning. Ben’s mom was with him, holding him. He wasn’t alone.”
He closed his eyes and she felt the wetness drip from his face to hers. She squeezed his hand harder, digging her nails into his flesh, her panicked eyes racing back and forth across his face.
Ben.
He flinched. She squeezed his hand harder, clawing at him.
Ben. Ben. Ben. Ben.
Sanger took a deep breath. “Ben’s dead, Clementine. The bullet hit his carotid artery. He bled out before the paramedics got there. There was nothing they could do.”
Q grappled to understand what he was saying. She knew it was true. She’d heard Ben draw his last breath on the porch long before the paramedics arrived. Her heart raced as she choked against the scream that was trapped by tube inside her throat. An alarm began to chirp and the door to her room opened.
“I told you to wait, detective,” the nurse said sternly. She injected something into the IV and tranquility settled over Q’s body almost instantly, filling her ears with a hissing roar that dulled her hearing.
“You should leave,” the nurse was saying to Sanger. “Go home. Get some sleep. You’re not going to do anybody any good like this.”
Q clasped Sanger’s hand as he sat on the edge of the bed, trying to tell him to stay; trying to beg him to not leave her alone in this hell into which she’d awoken. Sanger clutched her fingers and he glanced up at the nurse. “I’m not going anywhere. Get this fucking tube out of her throat so she can talk.”
Q blinked against the surge of narcotics in her bloodstream as her vision doubled.
“Don’t worry, Clementine. I’m here. I won’t leave you. Rest now.”
The world blacked over and a single thought filled her brain.
What the fuck am I going to do now?
Shiva: The First Seven Days
Sunlight cut through Q’s eyelashes, forming a web of splintered brightness. She was warm. As she slowly woke up, she remembered Sanger’s face telling her that Ben was dead.
What a fucking nightmare.
She shivered slightly and tried to roll over onto her left side, but Ben’s arm rested heavily on hers, holding her in place. Her mouth was dry and she opened and closed it several times trying to get her heavy tongue to speak.
“Ben, baby,” she said. “I had the worst dream. I'm so thirsty.”
A cool hand smoothed over her face and her grandmother’s gruff Cosmopolitan accent came into her ear, “It wasn’t a dream, mah dahlin’.”
Q’s eyes flung open and she squinted against the bright morning light. She was in a hospital room. The machines from her nightmare had been replaced with a single heart monitor. Her glass cage exchanged for solid walls covered in forced cheer. Her nose was dry and she reached up to feel a soft tube taped to her upper lip. Her grandmother caught her hand to prevent her from tugging at it.
Constance Toledano’s sterling hair was pulled into a tight bun at the back of her head. Her make-up was frayed at the edges, as if several layers of practiced cosmetic routine had been omitted by mistake. Q recognized the expression on her grandmother’s face. The iron-willed effort to keep all emotion out of the equation. To focus on the rational. To focus on the task in front of them.
As her grandmother’s fingers began their trained rhythmic pattern over the back of Q’s hand, she fought against the solace of their whispering, Hush, my darling. Hush, my darling.
Tears flooded up into her eyes and Q whimpered, “No. You’re wrong. Where’s Ben? I want to see Ben.”
Sanger approached the other side of the bed, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. “We talked about this last night, Clementine. You know what happened. But please, you have to stay calm.”
She let go of her grandmother’s hand and felt her soft, slack stomach, making real all the information her mind was fighting against processing. Numb grief turned the warmth she’d held within her into a chill that was at once desolate and strangely comforting.
“Where’s my baby?” she asked resolutely. “Can I hold him?”
Constance glanced up at Sanger and replied, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I want to see my son,” Q insisted. Struggling to push herself up, a thousand points of agony shuddered through the narcotics flooding her bloodstream.
Sanger covered Constance’s hand with his to stop her from speaking and said, “I’ll tell the nurse. You’ll see him. But rest. Please, you have to rest.”
When Q forced herself further upright, the pain of it made her vision blur, and Sanger eased her back down onto the bed with adamant power. “Please, Clementine. Rest.”
He briefly rested his forehead against hers by way of response and she turned her face away towards the window.
Her grandmother sat in the chair next to the bed and took her hand. Sniffling away strangled tears as she nodded silently to herself, Constance whispered, “We’ll be alright, mah dahlin’. It’ll be just fine. You’ll see.”
The door opened and a pretty, dark-haired nurse came in, followed by a man in scrubs who was smiling too much for Q’s current mood.
“Ms. Toledano, awake at last. Let’s see how we’re doing today.”
We’re doing shitty, fuckwad.
Q stared at her immobilized left hand as the surgeon examined her and explained what had been done to her body and what would have to be done next for her to recover fully. Aside from the abdominal wound that had nearly killed her, she was lucky. The bullets hadn’t done damage to any critical organ for her to continue to live, but one had done a number on the one critical organ she’d needed to keep her son within her body. She’d lost an ovary and would most likely never be able to get pregnant again, much less carry a child to term.
She finally cleared her throat and said, “I want to see my son.”
The surgeon looked confused for a moment and Q realized it was probably an inappropriate response to whatever question he’d just asked that she hadn’t heard, but she didn’t care.
“Look, I was shot. I understand that,” she explained. “I’ll have to do physical therapy. I understand that, too. I won’t be able to have babies, got it. You think I’m lucky to be alive, but right now, I just want to hold my son. So, whatever you need me to say or do so that can happen? I’ll do, but I need it to happen now.”
The surgeon’s smile faded and he finished his examination in silence before leaving without saying another word.
Her grandmother cleared her throat. “Your father’s here. He’s eating breakfast downstairs.”
Q nodded. “Ok.”
“Should I go get him?”
She shook her head. “No. Can we not talk, please?”
Constance rubbed her forehead and Sanger put a supportive hand on her shoulder. She patted it. “It’s alright, Aaron. I don’t feel like talking, either.”
Q stared out the window, ignoring her companions, for thirty intolerable minutes before a woman in pink scrubs finally came in holding an impossibly tiny object wrapped in a pale blue blanket. She placed the bundle in Q’s arms and told her to take as long as she needed.
She looked down at the sleeping face barely larger than her index finger. Her body shook.
“He looks like Nita,” she whispered to no one in particular.
Slowly unwrapping the blanket, trying not to notice the unnatural warmth and purple hue of her son’s skin, she took his hand between her fingers and gazed in wonder at his tiny thumb. Bringing it to her lips, she said, “I would have loved to be your mother.”
Enfolding him back into his blanket, she clutched him to her tingling breasts with her good arm and closed her eyes. She held him to her, willing him to breathe. Willing him to cry out the grief that she couldn’t release. Eventually, the false warmth left his body and she felt the lifelessness of him. When she opened her eyes, she searched for Sanger. He sat still in a chair near the window, his elbows resting on his knees, staring at the floor. Her grandmother had left the room.
Q cleared her throat. “I’m done. You can get the nurse.”
He nodded and stood up, walking to the door. He reached for the handle and stopped. Returning to the bed, he leaned over to move the blanket aside and regard the infant. “What’s his name?”
“Jasper.”
Sanger brushed his fingertips across the small cheek and said, “You mother is wrong, Jasper. You don’t look a thing like your Auntie Nita. You look just like your mommy.”
He kissed the infant’s forehead and left the room, returning with a nurse in tow. Q relinquished her son and asked, “Where are you taking him?”
The nurse looked uncomfortable. “Back downstairs.”
“To the morgue, you mean,” Q confirmed.
She cast her eyes down to the floor and nodded.
“His father is down there,” Q continued. “Ben Bordelon. Can you put him with his daddy? I don’t want him to be alone. Please, don’t let him be alone.”
Looking to Sanger for assistance, the nurse apologized, “I don’t know if it’s allowed…”
Sanger interrupted, “I’ll take care of it, Clementine. He won’t be alone. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
He gestured to the nurse and they left the room together. Q studied the unclouded morning outside her hospital room, questioning how the sun could possibly continue to shine, wondering why the world was still moving at all.
The swish of the heavy door pushing open interrupted her musings and she glanced in its direction. Ben’s parents came in, followed by his younger sisters, Yvie and Grace. Ben’s father carried a huge bouquet of daisies. A thousand flashes of Ben handing her dozens of bouquets over the years rushed through her mind and Q tried not to notice how much her father-in-law resembled his son.
“Brought you something to brighten your room, darlin’,” he said. “It is good to see you awake.”
His eyes were rimmed with red and Ben’s mother, Lila, looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. Her natural radiating beauty dimmed by sorrow.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and smoothed her hand over Q’s forehead. “Ben always said you were the toughest woman he’d ever met. And that’s saying something.”
Q tried a smile. “I’m so sorry, Mama.”
“Now, what are you sorry for?” she asked. “We’re going to make it through this, Q. You’re not alone. You’ll never be alone. You have us. You understand?”
She nodded slightly. “Sanger said you were holding Jasper.”
Lila squinted as she fought to understand. Her eyes flooded when she did. “Of course, I held my grandson. Who in the hell picked that name?”
“Your son,” Q said.
“He was a beautiful boy, darlin’. You did good.”
“Not good enough.” She looked away in shame and fingered her empty womb. Her words stilled the room and Grace descended into a fresh batch of heaving sobs. Yvie wrapped her arms around her sister and gently pushed her towards the door, whispering words of comfort, before joining her parents near Q’s bed.
“We’re going to the funeral home today, to make arrangements,” she said. “We thought we’d try to delay it until you’re out of here.”
Q shook her head. “No, they need to be buried as soon as possible. I want them buried as soon as possible.”
Yvie sat on the edge of the bed. “Don’t you want to be there?”
“No. I want them buried. It’s not natural for them to be here.” While Q had never been a superstitious person, her mind was filled with every horrific legend about demons snatching loved one’s bodies that she’d ever heard her father’s uncles whisper to each other while sitting shiva for deceased relatives. She turned to Ben’s father and his resemblance to his son scorched her insides. Swallowing hard, she reached for her glass of water. “You throw him a party. He’d like that. He’d want a party at the Cove. Cigars, Scotch, fun stories. He didn’t want a mass.”
Ben’s mother started to argue and Q stopped her. “I’m sorry, Ma. It’s what he wanted. No mass. Nothing religious. Just friends and family and a second line. Charlie – my old trumpet player- he can make that happen. He knows the people to call. Please, Ma.”
Lila flinched at the name that only Ben used for her and Q covered her mouth, not sure why she’d called her mother-in-law using Ben’s word and not her own. They stared at each other for a moment and Lila pushed the tears up and off her face, sniffing them away with a determined clearing of her throat. “Just a memorial at the Cove and a jazz funeral, then.”
She turned to her daughter. “Yvie, you get with Josh and make the arra
ngements. You two will know what he’d like more than us old folks.”
Yvie blinked back tears. “Sure, Mama. Anything you want.”
Q looked at her father-in-law. “I want something else. And I want you to promise me to make it happen, Daddy. You have to promise me. It’s the most important thing.”
Big Ben’s eyebrows stitched together and he said, “Anything, darlin’.”
“I want them to put Jasper in with him. In his coffin. I want Ben to hold his son. I don’t want them to be on their own when they can have each other.”