I held my own breath as I waited for his. I looked for breath, I listened for breath, I pushed at one shoulder to shake a breath out of him. I scanned his chest, hands, face for movement. I pulled at his hand so it would curl back. But there was no movement in the stiff, cold fingers and I knew that here was a lifeless effigy of my Stevie and that he would not breathe again.
The silence which had been hanging over the room descended, weighty and stifling. My throat constricted and then stretched, my voice emitted a long, high noise. But the density of the silence suffocated all sound and I could hear nothing.
When the others came in, breathless, their faces hollow and their eyes big, nobody spoke. They pressed against the crib and their movements caused the swaggering blue voile around it to flutter in a mocking imitation of life.
Faces around the blue crib, contorted with horror. Scott, his lips blanched and his skin translucent. Jane, next to me, eyes burning in a white mask of a face. And Daddy. Daddy’s mouth open, like a swimmer who has just surfaced after too long, gasping for air, his eyes full with the weight of the shock, looking up from Stevie’s body into my eyes and then slowly sliding off me as if the weight was too much to bear.
When I lifted Stevie out and held him to me and he failed to curl his body against mine, press his head into my shoulder, it seemed to me that the silence in the room was deafening.
‘Sit down, Lucy,’ said Larry firmly.
‘Calm down. Calm down now.’ Jane this time. But I did not understand their tone or their words. I thought I was already calm in the face of a vast inevitability but Larry seemed to arrest me, trapping my arms against my body, then holding his hand up as though he was going to slap me. Jane took the baby in a rapid, authoritative movement.
‘Stop, Lucy,’ said Larry. And the silence, which I now realized I had been covering with a blanket of screams, thinned.
Jane and Larry laid Stevie’s body on the changing table and began to pull at his clothes. Stevie was yielding but unhelpful. Larry felt for a pulse, Jane listened at his chest and they looked at each other and no words were necessary. Then Jane shifted her weight over Stevie and drew her elbows up and laid her hands on his heart, one on top of the other, and flapped over him like a long, slim, angular bird.
‘No point,’ said Larry. His voice was gruff. ‘Too cold.’
‘We should try,’ Jane insisted but when Larry only shrugged she dropped her elbows and I moved in to pick Stevie up and make him warm again, to stop the last heat from leaking out of him.
Larry said: ‘I’ll call the police.’ His voice was already professional, the voice he would use in the phone call.
There was a roar, so loud that I instinctively covered Stevie’s head, his ears, with a protective hand.
‘The police! What do the goddamn police have to do with anything?’
‘Shhhhh, Daddy,’ said Jane, but Daddy looked at her and his old arms began to flail. His movements were jerky and unaccustomed. His mouth was stretched into gaping shapes I did not recognize. Tears ran down his cheeks and dammed in the crevices they found there as he looked at Jane for the support we all rely on. It was the first time I saw him cry and I turned now, placing my back between Daddy’s wet face and my small, dead baby.
‘Daddy, it’s routine,’ Jane said in her hospital tone. ‘A baby’s died and the police have to come.’
I saw Scott flinch at these words. He was still frozen by Stevie’s crib. He hadn’t moved at all since he first came in.
When the police officers arrived, Scott was holding Stevie, wrapped in a blanket. He carried Stevie upstairs and the officers followed him. Others arrived, some went. I was interviewed by a white-haired man. I said: ‘It’s my fault.’
The man, who had thought the interview concluded and was leaving the room, paused and looked down at me and his whole body weight was behind that look.
‘Pardon me, ma’am?’
‘It’s all my fault. I’m to blame.’
He sat again, nearer to me this time.
‘Now,’ he asked. ‘Now, how is this your fault?’ His eyes were large with something more than compassion. Suspicion.
‘The blanket must have been too heavy. Last night was so cold, I put the big blanket on him but it was warmer tonight, I should have fetched a lighter blanket, maybe just a sheet…’
I could hear my words tumbling out on to the detective who opened his notebook and wrote something laboriously in it. When he looked up at me he said: ‘We’ll find out if there’s a cause of death. But with SIDS there’s usually no cause at all. Mothers always blame themselves, especially working mothers. They try to find something they did wrong just to explain it. But there usually isn’t any reason.’
‘It’s all my fault,’ I said.
The white-haired detective said: ‘I’ll send my colleague in to sit with you a while.’
He left the room and I could hear Larry talking to someone in the living-room.
‘Hysterical,’ he was saying. ‘Rushed down the stairs shrieking and then back up them and when we got to Stevie’s room she was running all around it, yelling.’
I wondered who they could be talking about. Certainly not me. I had been icy calm throughout.
The detective’s colleague arrived. He was young and his hair was neatly parted. He closed the door, sat down and watched me for a moment in silence before he leaned towards me. He leaned so close that he hissed. He said: ‘Have you heard the word of the Lord? Open your heart to the Lord and He will help you in your misery. I can give you a number to call for a female counsellor from my church. Please don’t tell my colleague I said this.’ I stared back into his bright eyes with incomprehension but without hostility. He was a part of the madness of that night.
Soon, Jane came in and sat down beside me. She took my hand but did not speak and the young detective left.
Much later, Scott brought our dead baby in. He lay in Scott’s arms, the blanket folded back to reveal the small, still face.
‘They’re going to take him,’ Scott said. His voice cracked and broke into a thousand pieces. Tears gushed down his cheeks as he handed me the unyielding doll who used to be Stevie.
A man and a woman stood in the doorway, the light behind them. They wore neat, loose uniforms of dark blue, almost black. Like vultures, they awaited my son’s body. I turned from them with hostility.
‘Take your time, sweetheart,’ said the woman.
I grasped Stevie for this leavetaking, holding his inelastic body against mine, studying him greedily. When I turned back, the woman moved forward and held out her arms to receive him. The emptiness of the place where Stevie had been felt like an emptiness which penetrated deeper than my heart and into my soul. As the couple left with my son I felt a loneliness beyond anything I had ever known, an eternity of loneliness, the loneliness of the grave. I covered my ears so I could not hear them drive away.
When I looked up, I saw Daddy. His face secreted misery. For a moment our eyes met in acknowledgement of each other’s wound and his filled with tears. He did not look away from me.
‘There is…’ He tried to speak. His voice was husky. He restarted his sentence several times before he was able to complete it. ‘Lucy, there is no escaping the immense pain which lies ahead.’
I nodded. I opened my mouth to speak but my own voice had a peculiar, unused quality like a blunt knife which could not slice the words. I had wanted to tell Daddy that, in some buried, primeval part of the brain which does not think, which cannot be controlled and which does not deal in the rational or the everyday, I had recognized my pain and found I was able to greet it not as a stranger but as an old family friend.
10
The tide at Needle Bay is going out. While I have been sitting here at the hilltop it has left a perfect fingernail of damp sand along the edge of the beach. The sun, where it catches the ocean, blanches the blue water. Waves peak, sparkle and disappear.
I start the car and begin my descent through the aromatic pines. I
hear the car tyres squishing against the track, still damp after the winter. Soon the sun will have pulverized it to dust. Then, a clearing in the trees, a carport, a car, and beneath me the little wooden cottage appears, squatting on the beach, sand lapping against the porch. It was newly painted when we moved here, yellow as the sun, but its brightness has already faded.
I get out and pine needles roll beneath my feet. I am halted by their intense scent and by the vast brightness of the sea only a few hundred yards away.
The back of the cottage lies low, as though someone planted it in the sand and it didn’t grow. Down the dangerous steps and around to the doors and windows and porch at the front. My feet hit the thick, dry sand and my body works to walk in it so that when I reach the wooden steps it feels, as when I reached Daddy’s house last night, like the end of some epic journey.
Scott is on the porch, sitting looking at the sea, just the way I’ve always imagined him waiting for me. There are two books open on the table in front of him and he fingers a coffee cup. When he sees me, dragging my heavy feet through the sand, my shoes in my hand, his face rearranges itself. All his features momentarily fly outwards and then are recomposed but not in exactly their right places and I know that he, too, has dreamed of this reunion many times.
When I reach the top step Scott stands up and puts a hand on the railings. We stare. There is three years pressing between us and a sort of shyness. And then I walk right through those years and right up to him and he puts his arms right around me and it feels like slipping into old clothes which long ago moulded themselves to your shape. He holds me hard against him and then harder and then he shudders and I know that he’s crying. I stay wrapped in the warmth of his body and the bigness of his frame and the security of his arms.
Finally, and it’s a complicated manoeuvre, we sit down at the table together and I hold his hand and stroke his big, shaggy head while he cries. It’s like stroking a lion. I move one of the books so it doesn’t get wet. I whisper that I’m sorry and it makes him cry harder.
‘Are you apologizing for going away?’ he asks at last, his voice strangled by tears, not like his real voice.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Then why are you sorry?’
‘I feel as though it’s all my fault.’
He turns to me and looks right at me, his grey eyes red now and his face swollen.
‘What? Stevie? Your dad?’
‘Everything. Everything which makes you cry.’
He sits up and puts his arm around me and we both look out to sea like the couple who moved in here together, four years after meeting, three years after marrying, two weeks after Stevie died.
I say: ‘Are you angry? Are you real mad at me?’
He says: ‘I’ve been mad at you for three goddamn years, Luce. In my head I’ve yelled and yelled at you. And now you’re here… I don’t want to yell, I just want to cry.’
When he’s cried some more he says: ‘I can’t believe Eric’s dead. He was sitting right here on Saturday. I loved that guy more than my own father.’ His voice cracks and breaks and to comfort him I move still closer so that I’m right under his shoulder. I’d forgotten how well we fit together.
‘How was Daddy on Saturday?’ I ask.
‘Oh, quiet. Because it was Stevie’s day, I guess. Quiet and sad. I’ve been thinking all day about how much sadness there was in his life.’
‘No!’ I protest. It’s an instinct. I don’t want Daddy’s life to have been sad although only yesterday I failed to recall him ever laughing.
‘Sure it was sad. He married this breathtakingly beautiful woman and it turns out she’s not fascinating because she’s Russian, she’s fascinating because she’s crazy. That’s sad. And his baby son died. Then his grandson. Then you went away. That’s all goddamn sad, except that it brought me closer to him because we both missed you so much and because he could understand about Stevie. I’ve found that I can only completely relate to people who understand about Stevie.’
It occurs to me now I’m home where I’m loved that all the time I was in New York I didn’t relate to people at all.
‘The police interviewed me yesterday,’ Scott is telling me. ‘Just like I was a goddamn suspect. I tried to explain how much I loved Eric but she ignored it, like I was saying something embarrassing.’
‘Who interviewed you?’
‘A woman detective. There was a man there too, an older guy. He didn’t say anything but he nodded a lot and I think he understood. The woman asked all the questions. I kept thinking I’d seen her before. Then this morning I remembered. At our old house on Lalupa. I think she came the night Stevie died.’
I stare at him. I stare at him so hard my eyes feel bulbous as glass which might crack.
‘What do you mean, Scott?’
‘There were so many of them, going in and out. It seemed like the entire police precinct was there. But I’m certain she was one of them.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, no, I didn’t recognize her at all. I don’t even remember any woman that night.’
Scott asks: ‘Have you been to Stevie’s grave yet?’
I shake my head. ‘I know you sent me that picture of the headstone but I still remember it as a little mound covered with flowers.’
‘Want me to go with you?’
‘Yes.’
I haven’t heard a car so when two figures round the house I am unprepared. Jane embraces me as warmly as she did yesterday. When I am close to her I sniff her summery perfume and when I look into her face I see her intelligence. It is indicated in her fine bone structure, the way her fair hair falls to her shoulders without complication.
‘Hi, Lucy,’ says Larry, standing behind her, puffing after his walk through the sand. Scott delivers cold drinks and we sprawl around the porch talking, just the way we used to. I look away from my family to the sea. It shifts restlessly in its great bowl. I hear their voices without listening to their words and gradually a distance seems to grow between me and them until the sea thunders as though I’m sitting right on the shoreline and their voices are far away.
‘I mean, did he actually mean to go to the beach to swim? Or was he coerced into going?’
‘He and Seymour were doing some new fitness programme. It did involve a lot of swimming.’
‘Listen, Big Brim is renowned for its cross-currents.’
‘True, but –’
‘But nothing. If he wanted to swim he wouldn’t have chosen that God-forsaken place, he’d have gone somewhere safe, like here. Eric was lured to Big Brim, or forced there against his will.’
I look away from them down the beach. I can define my whole life in beaches. As an adult, before Stevie, after Stevie. Before Scott, after Scott. As a teenager, one of a pack, playing volleyball, in love with Robert Joseph. As a daughter, with Mother and Jane and maybe Aunt Zina and Sasha. Holding picnic bowls with both hands and screwing them down into the sand, scraping sand from the cooler, dusting it from between my toes, feeling it ooze wet beneath my fingers or run hot beneath my feet. Conversations counterpointed by the slosh of the sea, informed by the direction of the tide, interrupted by the call of gulls and the shriek of children. It seems now that I have never left the beach.
‘The point is that he could have died anywhere.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, they didn’t have to kill him on the beach.’
‘You’re saying someone… it could have happened right at his own home?’
‘Maybe.’
‘But then why is his car missing?’
‘I’ll tell you. It didn’t happen at his home. He drove it somewhere and then died there. Maybe he happened to witness something he shouldn’t have seen. They killed him on the spot and hauled him to the beach. Something like that. When they find the car –’
‘If they find it.’
‘If they find it, then it’ll probably be right where he died.’
‘Jane, do the police know how much time there was be
tween death and immersion?’
‘I guess they’ll have to wait for the full autopsy report before they can know that, maybe not even then.’
‘So you’re really suggesting he died somewhere miles away and then his body was driven to Big Brim and he hit the water right there?’
‘Sure.’
‘C’mon, Larry, have you ever been to Big Brim?’
‘Well, no.’
‘You have to cross two, no, I think three, sand dunes, no one’s going to do that carrying a body.’
‘But Scott, who’s going to do any of it? I mean, who would want to kill Eric?’
There is a silence into which a wave crashes. A gull screeches. A child cries. A phone rings.
Scott’s feet thud on the wooden porch as he gets up and goes inside. We listen to his tone as he answers the call, guarded at first. When he asks: ‘Where?’ there is anxiety in his voice. We look at each other, then at the doorway of the beach house. In a moment, Scott’s big frame fills it.
He says: ‘The police have found Eric’s car.’
His words make me jump a little, so that my elbow flaps at an empty coffee cup and it flies suddenly into the air. Larry almost catches it but misses and it falls on to the warped planks at our feet. Jane goes inside to take the call while Scott bends to pick up the pieces. I stare at them lying in his hand, three pieces, cleanly broken.
When Jane emerges again, her face is pale. She sits down and Larry lifts her hand on to his lap and strokes it there.
‘They found Daddy’s car about five miles away. A place called Lowis. It’s south of here…’
‘I know it,’ says Scott. ‘It’s not far from Bellamy, right where you come off the freeway to go into the San Strana valley. So how come…?’
Jane is already shrugging. ‘The police don’t know how come yet. They’ve done all the forensic tests they need to do on the Oldsmobile. They asked me where they should take it. They thought the cheapest option was to tow it back to Daddy’s house so I said okay… now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have just told them to tow it to a scrapyard.’
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