by Joni Rodgers
But for Luke, there was no ripple on the face of the deep; for Luke, there was nothing, and so everything: eternity and abyss. He existed, omniscient, unconscious, in the unclouded iris of God.
Kit held him until he died, kissing his flawless chin and sweet forehead, touching each graceful finger and perfect toe, sharing the breath from his bow-shaped mouth and tiny nose. She was acutely aware, in those hours, that all this was for her own blessing, since he had no knowing of it. And with that awareness came the enormous revelation of all she had received while calling herself the giver. For the first time in her life, she knew what a privilege and gift, what a decadence it is to give love.
She cried then, but in the wake of a most unexpected joy. She’d expected an aberration, not a miracle, preparing herself for something neither human nor complete. And instead, here was Luke; resonating against the swell of his unborn cousin, warming Kit’s arms with his life, filling her heart with his peace beyond knowingness.
Even after they took him, his beauty stayed with her.
icould wile away the hours conversing with the flowers ... dee doot dee doodly doot
The ditty kept rewinding like tape on a reel, and Kiki let it scritch across and across her forehead like ninth grade irony, like fingernails on aluminum siding. She let the last line turn her stomach over like a nauseating little rise in the road, like pushing on a bruise, lemon juice in a paper cut. She kept hoping the small torment might eventually reactivate the numb nerve endings that webbed and cocooned her body now. Or maybe she’d get lucky and get hit by a bus. If the dull wound was cauterized by some spine-smashing, skull-crushing shock, she might be able to feel Chloe in her arms again. She might be able to stand for Oscar to touch her.
i would be bright and merry life would be a dingaderry if I only—
“Well, we’re a couple of sad cases, aren’t we?”
Vivica tossed an extra pillow over and eased onto the hammock next to Kiki, thin and pale as a wisp of smoke. Her hair was beginning to grow back—a white, fine stubble that stood out from her delicate head like a dandelion halo. It made Kiki feel afraid to breathe by her.
The poolside phone brreeped again; Vivica was subject to a constant stream of well-wishes from her ten thousand close personal friends. It was beginning to make Kiki nauseous, listening to her mother’s upbeat, Molly Brown bravado. All that Og Mandino, Zig Ziglar, positive attitude “when life gives you lemons” crap. Vivica was a commercial for pluckiness, marketing her survivorship like a Cherry Coke every time she picked up that stupid phone.
Kiki pushed one ear into the pillow and covered the other with her palm. She turned her face away from her mother, mouthing the words, silently mimicking. Hi! This is VIVica!
“Hi! This is Vivica,” Vivica proclaimed.
I’m still here, sweetie! How are YOU!
“Still here, sweetie! And how are you?” She stroked Kiki’s rumpled bangs back from her face. “Oh, she’s doing great. She’s a real trooper. She looks fabulous. Been working on a gorgeous tan. Oh, well, I’m not sure she... It’s just that, next week, she is frantically busy with... Well, I could ask her, but—”
“No.”
“Actually though, she and I have been talking about a cruise, so we don’t want to tie ourselves down. Oh, you mean now? I don’t think so. Because she’s sleeping right now. Well, you can talk to me about it. I’m handling all her—I beg your pardon? None of my business? Listen, pal— Prejudiced? It has nothing to do with that, Xylo, and you know it! Frankly, I’m insulted that you’d even— Oh. Prejudiced against musicians? Well okay, in that case, I am. What mother wouldn’t be?” Vivica sighed and pressed her temple. “I understand, but I told you, sweetie, she’s sleeping. She is so! I’m not... Oh, for pity’s sake—” She covered the receiver with her palm. “Kiki, I really don’t have the energy for this. Kiki? Please. He’s just going to keep calling.”
Kiki shook her head without any particular emotion.
“Kalene,” Vivica reprimanded in a hush. “I am not your personal secretary. Kalene?” She sighed and took her hand away from the mouthpiece. “I’m sorry, Xylo, but she really isn’t up to it right now. As for the rest of it, I’ll get Estelle to set up some auditions. She’ll be in touch. I know. I’ll tell her.” Vivica clicked the phone off and pushed in the thin antenna with her antenna-thin index finger. “Musicians. What did I tell you girls?”
“Mama! Grandma! Watch my back dive!”
Chloe cantered around to the deep end of the pool and ceremoniously took her position.
“I’m watching, Twinkie!” Vivica called. “We’re watching!”
Kiki turned away. It made her feel sick watching Chloe arch back, flying through the air in such an unnatural posture, her head so dangerously close to the cement wall.
“You’re okay, sweetie,” Vivica said. “You’re fine.”
Kiki didn’t know to whom Vivica was speaking, so she didn’t bother to answer.
“Yup. We’re okay. Survivors by definition have God on their side. I think if you manage to lose ten pounds and I manage to find them, we’ll both be good as new.”
Kiki didn’t say anything. Vivica kept stroking the bangs from her eyes.
“What is it, Moon Pie?”
“What is it?” Kiki laughed out loud. “Let’s see. What is it? My baby’s dead, my children and I are homeless, my late husband went and slept with—geez, Mama! What is it? What do you think it is? My life is a piece of shit! But I’m sure if I just lose a few pounds, well, that’ll just make everything peachy-keen, won’t it.”
Vivica didn’t say anything else for a while. The hammock drifted in the slow wind. Oscar and Chloe played by the pool.
“You know what we should do?” Vivica tapped Kiki’s shoulder. “We should do some Richard Simmons. Feel like Sweatin’ to the Oldies?”
Kiki rolled her eyes. Her mother worshipped Richard Simmons as the savior of the fucking universe. They were made for each other: the Two Marketeers—relentless, fucking, cheerful sadists to the heart and bone, both of them.
“Why don’t you two go ahead without me?” she barbed.
“Moon Pie, maybe—”
“What time is it?” Kiki pulled Vivica’s wrist up and turned it over so she could look at her watch. “I need my Valium.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Mama, don’t start with that again.”
“What you need—what we both need—is to get back to work.” Vivica nodded, straight ahead and then toward Kiki. “We’ve been sitting around for a month. I’m bored stiff. I’m going in to the office in the morning, and I want you to come with me.”
“I don’t feel like it.” Kiki reached across her mother for a can of Sprite.
“I’m going in to the office,” Vivica repeated. “And you’re coming with me.”
“I don’t feel like it.” Kiki swallowed two capsules with a swig of soda.
“Tough. You’re going.”
“Mama!”
Vivica laughed at that, because it sounded just like when she used to tell them it was bedtime. She let Kiki sulk while she shook the folds out of two large towels, wrapped her grandchildren in them, and sent them in to watch cartoons, then went back to the hammock.
“C’mon, honey. How much longer are you planning to sit around like this?”
“I have no plans at present, Mama.”
“Well, let’s take a look at your options.”
Vivica set the empty Sprite aside and picked up a notepad. Her answer to everything was to make a list, and there was no problem on it that couldn’t be solved with a princess waistline, a slipcover, or a can of mushroom soup.
“One,” she bulleted the first line. “You can start singing again. Xylo’s begging for you. He’s gone through three girls since Ramonica left.”
“No.”
“Two. The Dave Rossy Combo is losing their vocalist next month. Rossy would kill for you.”
“No.”
Kiki wrestled onto her side, fo
lding the pillow against her face. It always took too long for the Valium to push down on her eyes.
“Three,” Vivica prodded. “Estelle and I would love to have you full-time at the agency. Who knows the business better than you do? Or part-time, even. How would that be? A few days a week to start?”
Kiki waited for the dulling to seep up over her forehead.
“Four. Have you given any more thought to my idea? About recording a children’s album?”
“I don’t need to give it any more thought. It’s stupid. It’s worse than that stupid river medley.”
“You liked the concept before,” Vivica reminded her.
“That was before.”
“It’s marketable, Kiki. That’s a very hot demographic right now. And it’s the perfect project for you.”
“Well, maybe I’ll think about it someday, Mama, but right now—”
“I already booked the studio.”
“What?”
“And hired backup.”
“Who?” Kiki demanded, “Who did you get?”
“Not him” Vivica assured her. “Rossy and his bass player. I thought we’d keep it simple. Just piano, bass, and the fabulous vocal stylings of Miss Kiki Smithers.”
“When? How much is all this going to cost?”
“The studio is booked next month, the week of the eighteenth. And never mind the rest,” she said. “I’m making an investment. So,” Vivica flipped a few pages on her notepad, “the package design is already done. Estelle’s seen a pasteup, and she’s pleased, and I trust her. So, according to Discmakers in Philadelphia, we should be able to release in time for Christmas buying if we have negatives to their art department and a digital master to them by the twenty-ninth. I’m going with the same distributor we used on Xylo’s first CD. They did a reasonable job, plus I’m planning to market through several catalogues directed toward educational products, specialty items, yuppie parents, baby boomers, etcetera. Ool Bookstores. Borders, Barnes & Noble, that sort of thing. Now, I’ve made a list of possibilities, but we need to settle on a playlist and meet with Rossy ASAP so he can start on arrangements. Ah!”
She held her pencil up in the air as another hghtbulb blinked on.
“Headshots. Call photographer,” Vivica wrote aloud, then scrutinized Kiki’s head. “Call Giovanni. We’ll have him do something about those roots.”
Kiki flopped back on the pillows. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“Correction. You’re doing this.”
“I really don’t want to do this, Mama,” Kiki said.
“Tough!” Vivica stood up, not caring that it rocked Kiki right out of the hammock. “You need to. You need to do it, Kalene.”
“I told you before—”
“And I told you—tough!” Vivica countered, but then cajoled, “C’mon, now. Where’s that girl who never gives up, huh? Where’s my little trooper?”
“Oh, God, I hate that!” Kiki clapped her hands over her ears. “You’ve been laying that trooper thing on me all my life, and all it means is shut up. Shut up and take it, little girl! Be a trooper!”
“All right. I’m sorry. I apologize,” Vivica said. “I know the last year has been tough on you. But you know what Thelma Wells said. ‘Tough times don’t last. Tough people do!’”
“Would you please stop it with all that crap! You’re driving me fucking crazy!” Kiki took off her sunglasses and threw them across the terra-cotta tile, and Vivica followed their skippering trail with her eyes. “Why can’t you ever stop, Mama? Why can’t you see that what I need—I need— Why can’t you just be somebody’s mother?”
“Because,” Vivica took her daughter’s face between her hands and not very gently, “it’s your turn to be somebody’s mother, Kalene. You are the mommy now. And that means you don’t have the luxury of laying around here licking your wounds.”
“I can’t do it, Mama. I tried!”
“All your life, you’ve had people babying you,” Vivica went on without flinching. “Well, it’s about time you started doing things for yourself. Kiki, you owe it to yourself and you owe it to your children to get back on your feet, and that’s exactly what you’re going to do. You can’t continue to depend on me. I won’t always be here to—”
“Don’t say that!”
“I won’t be here, Kalene! Look at me, for Christ sake! Look what’s happening to me!”
“But you’re okay now! It’s okay!”
“I am not okay!” Now they were both crying. “I finished chemo, and everybody looked at me and said, ‘Well, thank God that’s over.’ Only it isn’t over for me! I’m sick, Kalene. I’m ugly and sick and so goddamn tired. I feel like I’ve been hit by a damn bus. And I don’t know when that bus is going to turn around and hit me again, and if it does hit me again, I can’t imagine how I’ll survive it. I don’t think I have the strength. I have to know that you’re going to be all right on your own. You and Kit. To have any peace, I need to know that.”
“Mama ...,” Kiki took hold of both Vivica’s hands, trying to stop their trembling, and she almost laughed. “Mama, you’re scared.”
“Oh, damn,” Vivica tried to speak around her broken up breathing. “I can’t explain why this is suddenly starting to hit me. It’s so damn stupid!”
“No, Mama, it isn’t.”
“You know, I was never quite happy with the way they looked. My breasts. I was going to have them done. Maybe for my birthday. And then I felt it. And I knew I should go, but when I thought about chemo and that they would ... they would— Oh, God, Kalene, they cut them off!” She pressed her hands to her chest as if she still couldn’t believe it. “I know I was an idiot to put it off so long, but I wasn’t done with them! I wasn’t done being beautiful and sexual. And I sure as hell wasn’t done being alive!”
When Kiki pulled her little mother into her arms, she could feel her heart beating fast as a bird’s.
“Kiki, I wish I could be here for you now. But I just—I can’t...”
“Shhhh,” Kiki rocked and whispered. “You’re still here, Mama. And you’re still beautiful, and you’re still alive. It’s all right.” And after stroking Vivica’s temple for a while, she forgot herself and cooed softly, “Mama’s here.”
They settled back into the hammock again, and after some time, Vivica’s breathing slowed to the rhythm of the rocking.
you took the part that once was my heart, Kiki hummed softly.
Oscar and Chloe were still inside watching television. The heat of the day was just coming on. Kiki left her mother sleeping in the shaded hammock and moved to a patio chair. She drew her finger under her blurred eyeliner and took up Vivica’s pencil and pad.
“Five.”
Mel hadn’t worn his suit since the day of his mother’s funeral, and as Mitzi and Sarah ran out to meet him in the yard, Kit noticed it was hanging sort of loosely on him.
“Wow,” he walked into the living room and pointed to the side of the rifle case Kit was refinishing for Pep Seward’s den. “Looks great.”
“Thanks.”
Kit was proud of the piece, even though it had taken her forever to get the English setter’s head shaped right, and even after all that, he looked like he shared a barber with Buster Poindexter, which compelled Kit to place Buster off in the reeds, disguised in a plaid shirt and Elmer Fudd hat, raising the neck of his electric guitar at a flock of indifferent geese overhead.
“Thanks for keeping the kids,” Mel said. “Carmen said to say thanks.”
“How is she doing?” Kit asked.
“Oh, you know. Funerals. This was a tough day on her. And then they went ahead and read the will and everything because people were needing to leave town.” Mel shuffled his foot at the corner of the drop cloth. “Carmen’s taking off for Albuquerque.”
“Yeah, she told me on the phone.”
There is only one great adventure, she’d added Confuciously, and that is inward toward the self, and Kit had to smile.
Carmen sen
se.
“She’s leaving Wednesday,” Mel said.
Kit braced her brush hand on her left arm to keep it steady.
“Are you invited?” she asked him.
“Yeah, I am.”
Kit nodded but didn’t say anything.
“I’m not going.”
“You can go if you want to, Mel.”
“I wasn’t waiting for your permission,” he sounded annoyed. “My kids are here. My friends are here. I’ve got eleven years seniority built up at the hangar. I live here. I do still have a life, you know. With or without you.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” She went back to painting, and he went back to looking forlorn. “I guess you’ll miss her.”
“I guess,” Mel said.
“Do you love her?”
“Is that allowed?”
Kit crossed behind him to pick up a fan brush and squeezed his shoulder on her way back to the Poindexter setter.
“Yeah,” she said. “Love’s allowed.”
Mel pulled a chair over from the kitchen and sat with his head back against the wall.
“We’re going to have to make some decisions,” he sighed.
“About...”
“I told Carmen I’d stay at the house until it’s sold, but the price they’re asking, it won’t take long. I don’t know how we’re going to afford an apartment in addition to everything else. And then there’s going to be lawyers and all that. I think we need to talk about selling the house.”
“No.”
“I was thinking, maybe we could get two apartments in the same complex, so the kids could go back and forth.”
“The kids are staying right here. With me.”
“Kit, I know how hard you’re working, but I don’t think you’re ready to take responsibility for—”
“Yes, I am,” she said, trying not to let the edge out of her voice, trying to make it sound like determination instead of fear, like Carmen taking flight for Albuquerque and points unknown. “I can. I will.”