Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  And he did. For a long time he left it all alone. Chris, the babies, his father and mother, the whole of Indiana and his so-called life there—he put all of them away. Alex and Olivia lived in the here and now, not the there and then, each for private reasons, each with private scars.

  So why did his life have to run on ahead and leave him lost again? “I want to have it,” Olivia said, stretching her hand across crumbs on the chipped kitchen table where they sat. A window was behind her, but not so much as a postage stamp of sky in it; the next house, subdivided into apartments like theirs, was so close Alex could’ve spat through an open window into a sink over there. There must have been a sunset, though. The siding of the other house was gilt to blood orange as the last of the day sank between the world’s cracks.

  He knew he was supposed to say, “I want to have it, too.” The words wouldn’t come. It wasn’t that he thought he could go back to be with Christine and the baby. Too late for that. Unlike most of his friends, he hadn’t sneaked over the border for a rendezvous, and certainly no one had come to see him. If anyone had, they’d have come with an arrest warrant—and probably a death sentence stapled right to it. He most likely would have just stayed on with Olivia without planning to and without planning not to, the way a whole, all-right life can just happen in the present tense if you’re lucky. Except for this. He knew about babies, about their screaming, peeing, shitting, spitting, about their choking, about how they died.

  When he’d been on the run, he’d thought the movie in his head and the shakes inside, like the pink baby’s jerky choking, would be with him until he killed himself. He’d fumbled when he called the operator from the pay phone outside the Rexall, sobbing into it for an ambulance, and then stood, trembling and glued to the sidewalk while first a police car then an ambulance had screeched by him. He knew the baby was Tina from hearing Chris’s Tina Tina Tina Tina as his feet had threatened to knot, stumbling down the apartment stairs to the street, to his car.

  After the ambulance passed him, huddled miserable, unnecessary, useless as a broken pool cue under the Rexall sign, he got into his car and went east, into Ohio, just because it was the nearest state border. He sped, but he couldn’t clear the movie from his head. It came to him that it was Tina who’d had the angriest diaper rash because Chris had said that if all else failed, he could undress them and compare their rear ends to tell them apart. Alex remembered her word, angriest. She’d said he’d know that if he changed more diapers. Something else to hate himself for.

  He had to stop at three convenience stores in southern Ohio before he found one with a map that included Canada. He routed himself north then, found I-71 to Cleveland until he could let the New York State Thruway hurl him through Erie, chain-smoking and working on a six-pack of Coke. He wanted the humming road to overcome the soundtrack of Chris’s word and the crying babies, then Tina, Tina, Tina, Tina—and it finally did, but the last scene kept playing, a translucent skim in front of onrushing highway signs when his eyes were open, and as real as living it when he pulled into a rest area for gas and sleep.

  Outside of Buffalo a sign veered him left, to the Peace Bridge, to Canada. He had fifty-two dollars and seventeen cents, fifty-one of it because he hadn’t paid the utility bill the way he was supposed to before he went to the army place. The folded bill was in his pants pocket with the money. He was ready for the Canadian Customs agent. “I’m just headed to Ridgeway—” he said without blinking or looking away, which his dad used to say showed a fat liar for what he was “—to see a friend.” He’d picked the town name off the map, well short of Toronto. “Nah, nothin’ coming in but me and my Coke.” True enough. “I’ll be back home tomorrow.” Definitely not.

  Even after questions asked in the third Toronto bar led him to Jimbo, and Jimbo led him to his boss, even after he got a couch and corner at Jimbo and McConn’s place, even with a job to learn, he’d see it and flinch—close his eyes and try to bat the memory away. Alcohol helped some. So did weed. Then Olivia.

  But now, another baby? A colored baby? The image of his father, rage-reddened, spitting on the sidewalk where a Negro’s path had collided with his own, came to him like the cringe when he thought of his father’s rough board of a hand.

  Alex felt like a nest of ferrets were fighting it out in the burlap sack of his mind. He couldn’t think of a thing to do but drown them all. The next day, after Olivia had gone to her job in a nursing home, he’d put most of his things in four pillowcases and left. It was one thing he knew how to do. He didn’t take Olivia’s foil-wrapped savings from its hiding place in the freezer; he even left some of his own money on the table in her cramped yellow kitchen, enough for her to get it taken care of if she changed her mind. He was going to leave a note, but then, since he couldn’t get it beyond “Dear Olivia,” crumpled it into his pants pocket and abandoned the thought. It was easy to hitch a freight toward Vancouver. There was a lot of work in fisheries, he’d heard, and he’d never seen the ocean. The first hundred miles, though, his stomach was sick and his heart thudded like a bird throwing itself against a window, the way they do, again and again and again, as if they’re intent on doing themselves in.

  ALEX HAD AWAKENED slowly that morning, his head pounding without mercy, to the small liquid sounds of Detta in the bathroom. He opened, then quickly closed his eyes again, trying to remember what had happened. He’d slept in his clothes; his shoes were on his feet. He elbowed and pulled himself to a sitting position, making slits of his eyelids against the light flooding in the open blinds. His foot hit a beer can and then, when he tried to put it down in another spot, several more. Detta appeared, all in black again, wearing some sort of brownish-purple lipstick. Her face otherwise was colorless. She’d lined her eyes with something heavy and black, like a death mask, which went right along with the death stare he’d nearly grown used to.

  Normally, he’d take her to school, but she walked by him—pausing just long enough to stare at the cans littering the floor. Cottonmouthed, he tried to stand to go after her, but his feet had tangled with the debris and he’d been too slow. She was two trailers down by the time he made it to his own door. Then it was obvious she was heading to the same trailer she’d been at the night before. Someone answered her knock, and while he stood there, struck stupid again by her nerve, the boy came out and joined Detta. They’d gotten in his rusty blue boat of a jalopy and taken off.

  “So what’re you gonna do?” Big Al said, keeping his eyes off Alex’s face.

  “Got no idea,” Alex said, morose. His head still ached. “I lost it, y’know? I mean, hanging with them. What’s she think she’s doing?”

  “So ya lost it,” Big Al said. “Didn’t hit her, did’ja?”

  “Nah.” The question surprised Alex, because it made him feel like Big Al could read his mind. He’d wanted to hit Detta and wondered if he would have, given a decent chance.

  Big Al nodded approvingly. “So you’re all right. I mean, with that court thing.”

  “Jesus.” Alex had been too woolly-headed to think about the psychological evaluation coming up. He settled his cigarettes back into the roll of his short sleeve, which had started to come down, wishing it were break time. “Jesus God. I gotta see this shrink doctor, then I gotta go again and bring Detta.”

  “That doctor gonna talk to your mother-in-law, too?”

  “Yeah. She’s gotta go, and then Detta’s gotta go with her. I gotta get time off. Shit.”

  “Hey, as long as you don’t hit ’em, you’re okay. Don’t beat yourself up,” Al said, the voice of experience. He mock-punched Alex on the arm. “If ya think ya fucked up, y’know, it don’t hurt to say I’m sorry. Women eat up that shit.”

  Alex couldn’t imagine those words in his own mouth. Besides, Detta had no business over there. None.

  “Yeah,” he said, tired.

  “Nah, ya don’t wanna do that,” Dink said, coming in on the tail of Al’s advice. Al pulled his cap lower and with his thumb and forefinger flatten
ed out his mustache, his gestures of restraint. Dink was shaking his head no.

  “Ya don’t want ’em to know when they’re bustin’ your balls,” he said. “Just lets ’em know they got their aim right. That’s what they like about it.” He tossed his clipboard onto a shelf and popped open a can of soda, which was against the rules unless they were on a break.

  “It ain’t time,” Alex said, ignoring Dink’s wisdom for the moment and pointedly looking at his watch. No point in attracting a write-up from the foreman.

  “You gotta be the one to say when it’s time,” Dink said. “Sometimes you just gotta say when.” He took a deep swallow and offered the can to Alex.

  “Hey,” Big Al said, ruining the drama of Dink’s moment because Alex looked away from the proffered can to Big Al, who was holding up a forefinger indicating he’d just remembered something. “I forgot to tell ya. I asked my girl Anna—she’s a whiz with books—to look it up. The encyclopedia says hummingbirds eat sugar water, that’s what she says. You’re supposed t’color it red. You can tell that to your girl.”

  Detta was already locked in her room when Alex got home, late because he’d stayed to clock in some overtime against the time off he needed for the appointments. At least he assumed her door was locked. He didn’t try it. No point doing that unless he was up for feeling like a fool again. That, or taking the door off the hinges, and he wasn’t sure about that with the court thing coming up. He just knocked and waited, the whorls of the fake wood door, inches from his face, making him faintly dizzy. His stomach was still off from last night. “Detta?”

  An exaggerated sigh from the other side. “What?”

  He felt like an idiot talking to the door. It made him mad, but he said what he had to say anyway. “Hummingbirds eat sugar water. You color it red.”

  “I know.” Disdainful. And she was the one who’d asked him.

  She didn’t answer when he said he’d heated up a frozen lasagna, and she didn’t come out. Before he turned out the light, at nine-thirty—though it felt like two in the morning, the evening that dead, long, silent—he tried one more time. “We got that evaluation thing on Monday. You gotta see the doctor with me, y’know.”

  “I know.” Her voice was as disgusted as his father’s had ever been.

  thirty-one

  RAMON GAVE ME RIDES to school yesterday and today. He said—Just show up in the morning, and you can go with me. I’m going to ask Grandma for some money to give him for gas.

  While he was berserk, Alexander the Goddamn Great shouted—I forbid you to go over there. There it was, big as a half-dollar on the road where someone lost it: he’s a lunatic. So, in the morning I just walked past him and all his nasty beer cans on the floor, and kept walking to Ramon’s house. I wish I had my camera, so I could prove he’s a crazy drunk, but it’s at Grandma’s with my real life. I’ll bring it back with me next time.

  Ramon’s not Mexican like I thought, and he’s not a regular black person. His family is Afro-Cuban, and he said his mother had escaped. I was embarrassed to ask what she’d escaped, whether it was a psychopath. They used to live in Miami, but then his mother knew some people up here and they made it this far, but now she wants to go back to Little Havana. I don’t know why, or how she knew she’d run far enough or too far.

  His mom is Rosa. She told me how pretty my blue eyes are, but hers are prettier. Ramon’s are like chocolates in a box, but Rosa’s are like tobacco. So’s her skin, and when she talks it sounds like a cross between a clarinet and a flute, and her voice and skin all flow in the same color, like a song. I never thought I’d miss band, but I do. Ramon introduced us the first day he gave me a ride home, and said my name was Alexis. I said—My name’s Detta. Ramon looked at me funny, but I could tell he wasn’t going to tell his mother about the police. She said hi, real nice, and told Ramon to fix us something to eat.—Sit to visit me a minute, she said, and she sort of patted the kitchen table, so I sat. Their trailer was fixed up with bright colors, crowded like Alex’s, but friendly-crowded, like a party instead of a funeral. There were yellow curtains up, and a woven cloth of all colors tucked in around the couch. Lots of pictures were up, and there was a sort of altar in one corner, covered with a cloth, with different heights of candles and pictures propped on it. I tried not to look like I was being nosy. Ramon got us sodas and opened a bag of pretzels. I was starving, but I tried not to take too many.

  —So you’re new? She said, and I told her yes, the court made me live with my father.

  —We are new also. Your parents, they have divorced?

  —No, well, they were, but my mom died.

  Then she looked so sad for me, and she put her hand over mine, and said,—That’s a terrible thing. My mother was lost early, too.

  I don’t know why but I told her about Mom and Grandma and Aunt Rebecca and Jilly. And that’s when I asked her about the bird feeders, what she put in them and how she knew. She showed me in a little book she said I could borrow (but it was in Spanish) to learn the different birds if I wanted to, and that’s when she told me about her hummingbird feeder.

  —Perhaps you feel your mother’s spirit in a bird, she said. Where I come from, we have Santeria, and we talk to our dead. But the spirit in a bird, well, not so much that. That’s just my thought.

  I liked how she talked, strong like Mom. And she was so pretty, I felt stupid in the clothes I was wearing and for making myself look like Darth Vader.

  —My mother was fast, like that hummingbird, I said. I mean, the way she moved. And she was little and then, too…I talk to her, I said, even though Ramon was there and I was afraid he’d tell someone at school.—Don’t tell, I told him. He just shook his head no, like he wouldn’t.

  —And that calls her spirit to you, child. Feel no shame about that.

  —Sometimes I think I can hear her. I whispered that, because I was afraid she’d think I was crazy saying I could hear a dead person talk to me, but she said—That’s good, that’s good, like it wasn’t insane at all.—You are listening to the great soul of life which is you and her and all that is seen and unseen. You are joined to life, child.

  —She told me to get my father, I said.

  —Get him? Like have him for you?

  —No, like get revenge.

  —But get means…

  —Oh, it’s something we say, get him, like stomp him. It’s just something people here say.

  Rosa looked at me funny.—Sometimes it’s hard to know the wishes of a spirit, Detta-chica. One way or another, you get your father, I think. When she called me Detta-chica I could feel Ramon wanting me to look at him so he could say told you with his face, but I didn’t.

  —Oh, that’s for sure. I hate him, I said.

  Rosa closed her eyes for a couple seconds and I thought I made her not like me, but then she opened them, all soft and amber and glowy and said,—You will work it out. She got up then and took a couple of steps and before I knew what was happening she gave me a hug and already backed off.—Ask your mama to help you, she said then.

  —I will. I am, I told her.

  —And she will, too. When Rosa said that, she looked like an angel because the sun was coming in the window behind her and made a halo on her right then. I don’t think there’s such a thing as angels, but Rosa looked like the pictures they used to show in Sunday School when Grandma took me a long time ago, when I was little, when Mom hadn’t died, when I thought things were different.

  When I left that first day, she told me to come back anytime. She even called it after me, so I know Alexander the Goddamn Great heard it. I want to and I will, I don’t care what my so-called father says.

  —WHY’D YOU TELL US your name is Detta? You said Al-ex-is to the cop, Ramon said, exaggerating the syllables like his tongue got stuck between them. I’d gone over the morning after I met Rosa to get a ride to school from Ramon.

  —It’s a nickname.

  —For Al-ex-is? he said, like yeah, sure, right, that makes sense.

&
nbsp; —No.

  I didn’t want to tell him more, not right then. I’m putting all my energy into making Alex lose in court and I didn’t know if I could trust him to help me. Maybe. I’ll see. In spite of what Rosa said about how Mom is with me, I’ve got to rely on myself, think of what to do to convince this doctor. I have to make Alex show himself for what he is. I’ll make him get himself.

  thirty-two

  BECCA’S CALL DIDN’T surprise Cora. It was as if her daughters vied for her full time and attention, even if one of them had to do it from her grave. Becca needed Cora to come stay at her house for a while, “…a few days, until I’m strong enough to get around again,” and it was also Cora’s weekend to get Lexie from Alex. Not only that, the appointment with the psychologist for Cora and Lexie together was to be Saturday morning. Cora had already gone once by herself. But there was no doubt Becca was desperately sick, scarcely able to stand unassisted; she’d been started on some new pain drug along with the radiation, which they’d had to cancel until Monday. The old feeling of being put to a test she was destined to fail flipped back to life in Cora’s stomach.

  She was trying—as she always did—not to say no to anybody. Becca wasn’t happy that she’d have to rely on Jill Saturday morning—and Lexie wasn’t happy about spending the weekend with Becca and Jill rather than in her room at Cora’s, but at least everybody was getting something she wanted. Except perhaps Cora, but then what she usually wanted most was to keep them happy, so maybe this arrangement qualified.

  Now it seemed the whole compromise was about to collapse like a house of twigs gone with the wind, as Christine would have said. Cora’s car wouldn’t start at nearly two on Friday afternoon when she should have been already on the road in order to get Lexie at school at two-thirty. It was hot, the car having gathered up and stored the sun’s midday heat. Cora impatiently rolled down her window as sweat popped out on the forehead she’d actually powdered, for once, after her shower. She was sticky in her sweater—she’d not gotten around to getting lightweight clothing out of storage yet—but wedged in the seat, she was too bulky to pull it off.