by Joni Rodgers
“Need help?” he called.
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He ripped the starter cord on the mower as Kit struggled the rest of the way to the ground.
“I CAN DO THIS MYSELF, YOU KNOW,” she shouted over the roar.
“WHAT?” Mel shouted back.
“I SAID I CAN MOW IT MYSELF, MEL!”
“I KNOW,” he boomed, “JESUS CHRIST, AM I ALLOWED TO BE NICE?”
Kit nodded sheepishly and pushed the side gate open for him. Out front, Cooper was rubbing marks on the driveway with a white rock, and he looked nervous as she approached.
“I got your little present,” she said.
Cooper ground the rock in a wide arc across the pavement.
“Guess what I’m gonna do with it?”
He glanced up, startled to see her dangling it by its tail.
“What?” he said with guarded curiosity.
“Art project,” Kit told him casually. “Wanna do it with me?”
“I hate art. It’s stupid.”
“Ah,” Kit nodded. “Well, this is actually kind of a combination art project/science experiment sort of thing.”
He looked skeptical.
“I’m gonna frame this lizard’s skeleton like a picture. I think it might be kind of pretty. Plus we can, you know, observe it and stuff.”
“How can you get all the guts and skin and everything off it?” Cooper asked, and Kit eased herself down onto the curb, patting the space next to her, inviting him to come and sit close.
“I’ll do like Psyche,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a story my mama used to tell me. She let the ants help her, and that’s what we’ll do. You run in and find a piece of black construction paper, and then we’ll lay the lizard on it, and while you’re gone over to Daddy’s this weekend, the ants’ll come and clean off everything but the bones.”
“No way!” Cooper’s eyes lit up with new interest.
“Way. And then when you get home on Sunday, we’ll very carefully spray some fixative on it to make it stay, and then we’ll frame it.”
“Can we hang it up in my room? Can we hang it on my poster wall?”
“I suppose,” Kit said. “If you don’t mind looking at some stupid art all the time.”
Cooper rolled his eyes, and Kit realized he was of an age where she’d either have to be a little bit more subtle or just come right out and tell him things.
“Go get the paper,” she told him, and he disappeared into the house, letting the screen door bang shut behind him.
“What’s being detected on the ultrasound,” Dr. Jane Poplin explained with a carefully trained gentleness, “is a condition known as anencephaly.”
“Right,” Kit said, “but I don’t know what that means.”
“It means the baby’s brain has not physically developed beyond the stem.”
“Oh...God...”
“Because the cerebral hemispheres are severely malformed or missing, the anencephalic infant has no function beyond the very basic autonomic responses and consequently dies within a short time after birth, usually a matter of hours, sometimes a few days, but never more than a week or two. Which is a mercy, because there is no possibility of any development.”
“Then is it better to ... to terminate the...”
“I do advise that if the condition is detected early in the pregnancy, or if there’s a threat to the mother’s health or future fertility, but ...,” Dr. Poplin shook her head. “Your sister’s obstetrician will have to advise her on that. The body of the anencephalic child can be healthy and normal with the exception of the malformed skull, so often organs can be harvested for transplant. She might want to consider that. And I understand she’s almost to term, anyway. As difficult as the next few weeks will be for her, I believe it’s usually better to let nature take its course.”
“Oh, God.” Kit started crying.
“As far as you flying down there, Kit, I have some reservations. Your life is bogged down with some pretty stressful circumstances right now. The headaches, the insomnia, the nightmares—these are indications that it’s affecting you, emotionally and physically.”
“I have to go,” Kit wept. “Our mom, she just finished chemotherapy, and she’s in the hospital. And it’s not even the same hospital. Kiki’s going to be there all by herself! She can’t do this all by herself.”
“She will do this all by herself,” Jane Poplin said, “even if you’re there. She’s the one going through it, and there’s nothing you can do to take that away from her, no matter how much you want to help. But,” she sighed, “I have a little sister, too.”
She put her glasses back on and looked at Kit’s chart.
“You’re still a good fourteen weeks from delivery, so I think it’s safe to fly. Just be aware of how you’re feeling, and Kit, you’ve got to be ruthless. Your baby is healthy, and we want to keep it that way. You come first. I know that flies in the face of everything a good mommy or a good sister or a good daughter is supposed to do, but with this history of extremely short labor, you can’t afford to be noble.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll give you the name of an OB down there, and I want you to call him if there’s anything at all that feels like it could be labor—indigestion, lower back pain, anything, okay?”
“Okay,” Kit said obediently.
“I’ve seen you through three pregnancies,” Dr. Poplin smiled. “I think it’s only fair if I finally get to attend a delivery.”
Kit nodded and lay back, listening to her second heart, throbbing like a locomotive in the stethoscope.
“You came,” Kiki said over and over. “You came.”
She was pale and groggy with painkillers.
“Of course, you goose!” Kit said too cheerfully. “Of course I came!”
And of course she had. Straight from the airport to the hospital, her stomach roiling with indigestion, her lower back clenched in spasms.
“But what did you do with your kids?” Kiki worried.
“They’re with Mel. They’re fine. Mitzi’s loving Mrs. Garza’s swimming pool, and Cooper is—well, when he’s willing to speak to me these days, he seems like he’s doing okay. They miss you.”
Kit opened her purse and gave Kiki the construction paper cards they’d made for her.
“Oh, I miss them, too,” she sighed. “And I’ve missed you, Kit. I thought you were mad at me over the money or something because—Kit, that money, did that money have anything to do with you and Mel?”
“Oh, Kiki, of course not!”
“I’ve been feeling so guilty for taking it. I knew I shouldn’t.”
“Would you stop this, please? Kiki, that money is the least of our worries right now. I don’t even want you to think about it. I don’t care if I ever see it again. Don’t you know that?”
“Well sure, Kit. But I care. Don’t you know that?”
“Shhh,” Kit made her lay down again, and the nurse readjusted the monitor belt around her middle, measuring contractions on graph paper that streamed out in a roller coaster of peaks and valleys.
“Don’t you know, Kit, that I get awful tired of being your baby sister? My whole life I’ve been trying to look as good as you or sing as good as you or—I don’t know—be as good as you at something.”
“No! I don’t know any of that! It’s ridiculous. Look at you! You’re beautiful and sweet and good and you’re ...,” Kit noticed the peaks climbing higher on the graph paper.
“Oh... oh Lord...,” Kiki groaned and rolled onto her side as another contraction wrapped around her. Kit pushed her hand against the small of Kiki’s back and stroked her forehead.
“Whoa!” Kiki whispered, returning to the valley. “They’re getting bigger.”
“I know, sweetie. That’s good, though. That means it won’t be long.”
“You’re five centimeters dilated,�
� the nurse concurred, “ninety percent effaced.”
Kit stroked Kiki’s arm and pressed ice chips against her dry lips.
“The reason I haven’t called—I haven’t been mad at you, Kiki. I’ve been mad at me. I’ve been feeling so guilty.”
“Guilty?” Kiki paused until the nurse left the room, then asked, “What for?”
“Because I’ve been so wrapped up in things. I haven’t been there for you, and I haven’t been there for Mom and ... Kiki, ever since we were little girls, I always—I got so jealous of you sometimes, and—and it just made me treat you not very nice and everything.”
“Hmm,” Kiki said. “I thought you meant for having sex with Wayne.”
“Oh, Kiki,” Kit breathed. “How long have you known?”
“He told me a long time ago. But I didn’t believe him. When I got back after Mama’s mastectomy, I could tell something was eating on you, but I never thought—Anyway, later, I found out about the paternity test.”
They sat quietly together.
“Kiki, I want to tell you—”
“No! No, it’s okay, Kit. Because I figured it out. I figured he must of been drinking, and he thought you were me. And maybe you had an epileptic seizure, or—or maybe it was real dark, and you were real sound asleep, and you thought it was a dream. A beautiful dream about Omar Sharif. You would’ve made him stop if you knew it wasn’t a dream. And he didn’t mean it to hurt you, Kit. He wouldn’t—he could never do that to you. It was an accident is all. Wasn’t it, Kitty? Isn’t that the way it happened?”
“When he... I was...”
Kit felt twin chasms of damnation yawning to either side of her but recognized she didn’t necessarily have to drag Kiki down with her.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s—that’s what happened.”
“Thank you.” Kiki clasped her hands together like a prayer.
“I don’t want it to burn a hole in your heart, Kitty. But right now, that’s what I have to think. I need to remember him as the father of my babies. Of this baby.” She closed her eyes as if to concentrate on that very hard.
“Do you still want me to be here?” Kit asked, when she couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
“Of course I do! I can’t afford to lose you, too! Wayne’s gone and Mama... Kit, she’s so sick, it scares me. And now I’m gonna lose my baby. It would be too hard if I lost you, too. I need you to be my big sister. Because I can’t feel anything right now, Kit. I can’t feel a thing. So somebody else has to be here who can love him. Because that would be worse than anything, wouldn’t it? To never be loved even a little?”
“I’ll try,” Kit promised.
“You don’t have to try, Kitty. Just be here.”
Kiki put her arms around her to the extent she could, and their turgid bellies pushed together.
The organ harvest person came with a support group woman who told Kiki about how she’d given birth to an anencephalic child, and she even had pictures of the dead baby all fixed up in christening clothes. She told Kiki how having given that gift of life was all that made it bearable. They told Kiki about the babies on the waiting lists and the healthy heart and corneas and kidneys she held like hoarded treasure inside her, like money in a mattress, like the gift of the magi, all dressed up with no place to go. They talked about what great good could come out of this tragedy, as if that decked the tragedy out in sequins and made it something noble.
Kit urged her to sign the papers, thinking that would make them go away, and they urged Kiki to listen to her sister.
Kiki took the pen in her hand.
“I would have named him Luke,” she said. “If he was mine.”
She signed, and they blessed her for caring. They left, and Kit blessed them for leaving.
Two more hours passed, Kiki sweating and groaning through the contractions, Kit offering a cold washcloth for her to suck on, singing softly in her ear, tucking her into the starchy sheets as if they were back in their own ruffled bed.
“But Psyche was a very brave girl,” Kit said, stroking Kiki’s bangs back from her damp forehead, telling her the story she’d always begged for when they were little and less little. “Very brave. Just like you. And she went to Aphrodite and asked her what she should do.”
Kiki drifted on the waves of pain and painkillers and the sound of her mother’s voice.
‘“If you wish to redeem yourself,’ the Chatty Cathy doll warned, ‘you shall do it by dint of industry and diligence!’”
The ring of her pull-string made a scabbard for a sword whenever she played the stern mother goddess.
“What’s ‘dint’ mean. Mama?”
“Yeah, Mama. And what’s ‘digilence’?”
“Well, I’m not sure about ‘dint,’ but diligence means that you stick to it. Anyhow,” the mommy continued, raising Chatty Cathy’s hand, “Aphrodite set forth three impossible tasks for Psyche to accomplish. First, she made her sort the seeds and grains with which she fed the doves that drew her golden chariot. But the king of the ants took pity on Psyche and brought all his armies, and they sorted the piles for her, seed by seed and grain by grain.”
“I bet she didn’t step on ants anymore after that, huh? Or spray ‘em or anything.”
“The next day, she had to gather the golden fleece of the ferocious rams who grazed in the field.”
Two fuzz puppies, brown heads nodding, were set out in the field of rose-colored carpet, and the little girls gave them voices of such ferocity that poor Skipper Psyche hid, shivering, by the blue jean leg river.
“But Psyche was a very clever girl. She waited until the rams were asleep in the afternoon sun, and then she gathered the bits of fleece that clung to the bushes.”
The puppies had to sleep sitting up because their heads fell off if they lay down, but the fleece was finally gathered and laid at the feet of the goddess.
‘“Now,’ said Aphrodite, ‘you will journey to the underworld—’”
The little sisters giggled, because “underworld” always made them think of “underwear.”
‘“—and tell Persephone to fill this box with a little of her beauty.’”
“This can be the underworld!” The little sister draped a beach towel across two chairs, and they all three put their heads inside.
“Can she have the flashlight, Mama?”
“Yeah, Mama, that can be her torch!”
“Okay. Here she goes. Where’s Persephone?”
A Barbie in a Kleenex toga was placed among the souls of baby dolls and stuffed animals who wandered the shadows, and Psyche ventured past their grasping paws and pitiful wailing.
“‘My mistress must have a little of your beauty,’ said Psyche, and the sympathetic Persephone gave it to her, admonishing, ‘Take care that you do not open the box!’”
“That’s what they told Pandora. That never works.”
“No, Bitty Kitty, I guess it’s just not in a girl’s nature to do as she’s told,” the mommy sighed. “Because on the way back...”
‘“Oh dang,’” the littler sister wrinkled her nose toward a tiny accessories-sold-separately foil mirror. ‘“I’m not having a very pretty day today.’” She dipped Skipper’s hand into the empty Band-Aid tin. ‘“I better take a tiny bit to make myself look pretty for my husband.’”
“But when she opened the box, she discovered it was filled with a powerful sleep that came over her like—”
“Oh, God, Kit! Help me! Kit, it hurts ...”
“Can you breathe, Kiki? Kiki, look at me. Hwee hwee hwee— like that.”
Kit pushed her hand against the small of Kiki’s back.
“You’re almost there, Kiki,” the nurse encouraged. “You’re doin’ good.”
When the time of transition came, Kiki didn’t scream or swear like some women. She didn’t curse or cry. But at one point, she grasped Kit’s hand hard enough to hurt.
“Don’t you think they could give me something to make me go to sleep?” she whispered. “Ple
ase, Kit! I want to go to sleep. Couldn’t they just take it out of me while I’m sleeping?”
And then another contraction was on her, and her obstetrician came and determined that she was fully dilated and it was time to push.
“Oh, no! No, I can’t do this! They have to knock me out, Kit. They have to!”
“Yes, you can. You can do this, Kiki. You can,” Kit mantraed and affirmed. “You are strong and brave and beautiful. You are Kalene Olympia Smithers, Professional Singer.”
Someone gave Kit a pair of blue-green pants, enormous gown, face mask, paper shoes. She followed the gurney down the hall to the delivery room, where another hour blurred by as she stood, feet numb and back aching. She clutched Kiki’s hand, telling her she would be okay, telling her what a good little trooper she always was, telling her that it was almost over now, truly wanting it to be over for Kiki’s sake, but secretly dreading the moment the changeling would emerge, deformed and inert.
As it came, Kit focused on her sister’s face, unable to go any further with her, but willing her to know how much she was loved.
Kiki had no more ability to cry than the infant. She was calm as they delivered the placenta, severed the cord, asked her if she was ready. She wanted to hold him. She wanted to, but was seized by the terrible trembling that sometimes accompanies shock and childbirth, and the nurses moved swiftly to cover her with oven-warmed blankets.
“Bye-bye, Luke,” she said, and when she kissed his forehead, her mouth came away painted with her own red blood and the baby’s delicate white vernix.
They gave her a shot of something, and she slept as the doctor sutured her episiotomy.
There was such a quiet in the room then. Silence radiated outward from the tiny form as he was passed through the necessary hands, being washed, measured, swaddled in a small, soft blanket, and when Kit received him into her arms, she understood the nature of it. It was a peace that eludes all living creatures with the precious exception of those born to it; the unattainable om aspired to by the Zen master and cloistered nun in all their deepest days of prayer, but beyond the reach of any spirit encumbered by presence of mind, by floor beneath feet, by the memory of an insect—even by the thought of thinking nothing—shifting the consciousness, if ever so slightly as a drop of rain on the surface of an ocean.