by LOTT, BRET
He was taller than Leston, and finally let go the chair to put out his hand, first to Leston, who shook it once, then to me. His hand was soft, a doctor’s hand, the flesh of his palm thick and warm.
He motioned for us to sit in the two chairs in front of his desk. I glanced behind me as I took my seat, hoping for one more smile from the old nurse, but the door was already closed.
“Now, ” the doctor said, and sat back down. He leaned forward, put his elbows on the edge of the desk, laced his fingers together. “Dr. Beaudry tells me I need to have a look-see at this baby.” His eyes were on Brenda Kay.
I tried again to smile, said, “Look-see must be one of these new doctor terms. That’s the same thing Dr. Beaudry said he wanted to do.” They were words of no use to any of us, spoken more to hear my own voice in here than for anything else.
He laughed, leaned back in the chair at the same time, his hands still laced together. “Dr. Beaudry’s an old student of mine. I imagine he’s taken some of my own terminology with him.”
“Doctor, ” Leston said, and for a moment I wondered if, again, he would try his best to take over here. He hadn’t even looked at me this time, had even done away with the pretense of clearing his throat. He said, “We came all the way from Purvis this morning. We waited more than an hour in your office.” He paused. “All due respect, sir, we want to talk about Brenda Kay.”
Dr. Basket looked at Leston, his smile there for a moment, but then gone.
Leston said nothing else, but I was thankful for his words this time, for his having spoken. He’d given us entry into the terrible truth we were facing right now. His words had opened the door I wanted kept closed, but knew needed opening all the same.
The doctor moved to the edge of the desk, his elbows there again. He said, “You’ll have to let me examine her, of course. Then we can talk.”
He stood again, held out his arms to me as he came slowly around the edge of the desk, and without a thought I held up my baby to him, Brenda Kay so much smaller in his arms than mine, a baby so small it didn’t seem possible that in her could be anything so awful I we had to come to a city hours from home. But still here she was, and I felt myself standing, felt my legs carrying my body along behind the doctor as we went in to another examination room, the same equipment hanging from the wall and laid out in trays as in Dr. Beaudry’s room, only more of it in here, all of it glistening with what looked like some clean idea of death, my naked baby on the table, white light pouring down on all three of us. Brenda Kay was awake this time, her arms and legs moving like she was under water, slow and deliberate and without effect. She still couldn’t yet roll over.
He gave her the same examination, but spent longer on each push of an arm, each stretching out of fingers, each look in her eyes. His movement was slow, but perfect somehow, his long and thin fingers holding out Brenda Kay’s in a way that seemed softer than was possible, the touch simple and distant and warm all at once. I don’t know how long we were in there, didn’t care. Leston was back in the office, readying himself in his silence, and I was readying myself in here, just standing near, though the doctor didn’t even look at me. He didn’t ask a single question of me, didn’t even ask for my help as he finally pinned up the diaper, ran his fingertips across her forehead one last time, traced her eyes just as Dr. Beaudry had. He even dressed her, slipped back on the green flannel gown I’d dressed her in in the dark of a morning that seemed a thousand miles from here.
He handed her to me. I was looking for him to hide his eyes from me, too, just as Dr. Beaudry’d done, but he looked at me as he gave her over, a small smile on his face, his head dipped down, his eyes taking me in over the top of his glasses. “Let’s go and have a seat, ” he whispered, and pulled open the door into his office. He let me go first, and as I passed from the white light into the dark wood office, I felt his hand on my shoulder, felt it pat me once, twice, then rest there a moment as we came near his desk.
I felt my mouth go dry, felt my heart go to stone. I didn’t even look at Leston, or if I had, didn’t see him. I only sat, Brenda Kay in my arms.
The doctor sat back in the chair, his eyes on the desktop a moment.
But he gave up on that idea, and looked first to Leston, then to me.
He glanced at Brenda Kay, did his best to look at the two of us, tried hard to hold us each for a second or two.
He said, “What I will tell you is not easy to hear. But what I have to tell you, these words, are necessary.” He paused. His hands were flat on the desk, and he lifted them, held them in front of him, looked at them.
“Hands, ” he said, and stopped. He took a breath. “Our hands tell us much, ” he said, “and Brenda Kay’s hands tell us much, too. They tell us that she is a child given to us by powers none of us can understand.
They tell us we can’t always depend on nature. That things go wrong.”
My arms were stiff with straining, locked into place around what I carried, my child.
“Brenda Kay is a Mongolian Idiot, ” he said. He brought his hands down, let them settle into his lap. He was looking at me.
I swallowed, felt my palms sweating, clutched on the blanket my baby was wrapped in. I felt minutes pressing down on me, felt time and air and everything pressing down.
I whispered, “What does that mean? ” the words ground glass in my throat.
“It means, ” he said, “she is mentally and physically retarded. She will never progress much more than this, than what she is right now.”
He paused again. He held up his hand, pointed to his palm, gently ran his finger along the lines there. “The evidence is in her hands, and her feet. Flat, broad hands, abnormally short fingers, little fingers curved in as drastically as they are, and the two smaller toes as well.
And an abnormal line pattern.” He stopped, adjusted his glasses.
“And there is her face as well. Her eyes, their slanting upward, her broad forehead, her features smaller than a normal child’s.” He stopped again, brought his hands together on the desktop. “What I must say is quite difficult, but as I said, I need to let you know.” He folded his fingers together.
He said, “Because of this condition, chances are small that she will live past two years.”
I’d waited since Christmas to find why she slept as much as she did, afraid all the while of an answer. And I’d waited eleven days since the doctor back in Purvis wouldn’t tell us what was wrong. I’d waited for this moment.
Now here it was, and there was nothing in me. I was hollow, dead wood.
The only thing I saw in that moment, the doctor’s own hands on the desktop again, his mouth drawn closed, eyes fixed on me and the baby I held a Mongolian Idiot, two words already weighing down my arms, my chest heavy with them, my breath now short and as hollow as the rest of me the only thing I saw in that moment was that I’d spent my whole life waiting for news like this to come, not just the time since Christmas, not even just since near a year ago when Cathe ral’d stood in light from my kitchen and told me it was coming, all of it was coming, all of it from God up in his heaven.
No. I’d been waiting for this since the moment my Momma’d died in an upstairs room in a mansion, because there’d been too much good come to me since then, Leston, my children, food on the table, a roof above our heads.
All this in a moment, before I even thought to look down at my baby in my arms, her squirming, before I thought to look at Leston, . see where he was, see who he would be now. All this even before I thought to breathe again.
Then I remembered the birth, remembered the doctor pushing, pressing down on me with all the might a small-town doctor like him could give, but strength enough to hurt my baby. It was blame I was after then, blame and responsibility and someone to look at and spit in the face of.
It was the doctor, him and his hospital, when I’d bore every one of my children at home and’d done fine.
“It was the doctor, ” I said. “It was when Brenda Kay was born, and ho
w he pushed me, pushed my baby. He pressed down on me to get her out.
That’s why her face is that way, why her hands are that way. That’s why she’s not right.” The words left me in one string, all of them chained together and falling from me without any thought. But it was true, it was his fault, the blame square on him. I knew that.
“Mrs. Hilburn, ” the doctor said. He closed his eyes, opened them.
He let out a breath. “This condition is present at conception. That much we know about it.”
He bowed his head a moment, and suddenly I thought of him, of what it must take for him to deliver news like this, saw, too, that Dr. Beaudry’d known all along, knew she’d die in two years and’d told us otherwise just so he could pass us on to his old teacher for the filthy work this was. I saw that there was pain in it for him, too, for Dr. Basket. But my heart didn’t go out to him. He hadn’t borne my child, or any of the others he’d ever given this speech to. He could go home from here, have his dinner, tend to surgery later today while we drove on home, poor crackers he felt sorry for, a Mongolian Idiot there in the front seat of an old pickup truck they’d left outside town, afraid of driving in the big city.
He looked up. He said, “The best thing for you, the best measure to be taken, in my considered opinion, is to give her up to an institution.
There she will be cared for, tended to. The burden she could be to you for however long she lives is immeasurable. Institutionalized, she will be away from you and your household, and cared for.”
“Institution, ” Leston whispered, his first word.
I didn’t look at him. I only stared at the doctor, my eyes dry, no tears for him or for Leston or for anyone, not even for me.
I stood. I said, “Good-bye, Doctor, ” and I turned, moved for the door.
I heard from behind me the squeak of Doctor Basket’s chair as he stood, heard steps on the hardwood floor behind me.
The nurse opened the door before I was even there, light from the hallway spilling onto me and my baby, the old woman standing to one side, no smile anywhere, only her eyes on me, her forehead a field of wrinkles, trying again for that comfort she wanted to give.
I didn’t look at her, and turned, went down the hall into the front room, headed for the door.
“Mr. Hilburn, ” the doctor said, “we will need to meet again. We will need to talk together.” His words were calm, smooth. There was care in them, I knew. But I didn’t want his care right now. I didn’t want him to be in on this, whatever it was. I reached the door, pulled it open to sunlight outside flooding the courtyard, no shadows anywhere.
The bricks, the mold, the dirty water in the trough and those dead geraniums were washed out in white light, and I couldn’t wait to get past them and through that gate and into another taxi and out of this place and home, where I might be able to make sense of how this world was crashing to its end, me unable even to imagine there might be another to come.
I heard Leston say, “Sir, ” imagined him just touching the brim of his hat, giving the smallest nod to the doctor, then turning, following me out onto the street, where I was already waiting for a taxi.
Lake Pontchartrain was nothing, only a dull green body of water we passed over, the bridge low and flat and gray. Picayune was just another town, and I didn’t give a care as to whether I’d ever lived there or not. The soldiers and whores in New Orleans were long behind us. The only thing that mattered was the baby in my arms.
We passed through those towns again, the ones we passed through this morning, no difference in them at all. I’d expected something different, expected people to walk slower, their faces to wear some cold and clouded look after the news from New Orleans. But there was nothing different, people still smiled, talked, held their hats against the afternoon breeze, bent down to tie shoes, double-parked outside the drugstore. The same pine and crepe myrtle and high thick roadside weeds swallowed us up each time we left a town, broke up each time we entered a new one.
But on that ride, certain things came to me, most clearly me and that blanket and how I’d pulled it back to show my dead daddy. I thought of New Orleans, the city that’d existed in my head before this day, the place my parents’d had their honeymoon, and I wondered, too, whatever happened to the postcard of Jackson Square my momma had taken out of the pillowcase the morning Benjamin brought over my daddy’s belongings.
I thought of my momma telling me her last stories so I’d know what I could of who I was, and there was the picture in my head, too, of Molly and Cathe ral and that chapter in Ezekiel. These pictures came to me, stories of my own life, and how I’d taken hold of it by the throat, made it come around to what I could make it, how I’d fixed things on my own.
I still had the picture of my grandfather, Jacob Chandler, Jacob Chetauga, framed and in the front room of the house, Burton still taking his leads on how to stand, how to act, how to take care of himself from how his great-grandpa stood in that picture.
What all those pictures told me, what all the stories in my life said to me there in the cab of a truck, my baby in my arms, was that I could fix things, though the world was falling down on itself, crumbling beneath us.
I could fix things. I knew I could. All the child in my arms, all Brenda Kay I decided then, there, that no one would ever use those two words, use Mongolian Idiot, to describe her in my presence, unless they wanted my full wrath down on them needed was my love, not my abandonment. I had lived that loss myself, no matter my baby wasn’t normal as I’d been, was sick in some way I couldn’t understand, no matter, too, she was what the doctor figured on being only a burden.
No matter he was already figuring on her dying. He didn’t know me, didn’t know what I could live through.
I could do it. I could fix things, my life, my children’s lives, my husband’s life. Brenda Kay’s.
And so on that drive home, me losing track of what town was which as we moved along the old road, Leston not having lit up a cigarette yet, both hands tight on the steering wheel, his knuckles white as the skin my dead daddy’s’d been, I tried out my words, said to the cab, “We’ll keep her.” I said, “She’ll be loved, no matter how long she lives.” I said, “God will fix her, ” though I knew I was putting faith into a god I hadn’t yet been able to count on for anything other than what I didn’t want. But the words sounded right, seemed full of some promise I was ready to grab hold of. I said, “We can fix this, if everyone in this household gives her the love they’ve got, and all of it.” I said, “We can fix this. We can.”
Leston finally turned to me. I hadn’t been looking at him, but out the front window to the blacktop cutting through the green.
I looked at him. His eyes were wet, red, his mouth open, the hair on this man, this man even older now, tousled by the wind from his open window. Fear was on him now, fear like an open wound, fresh and raw.
He swallowed, said, “Can we, Jewel? ” I nodded, quick and sharp, and thought of the same move the old nurse had made before we’d entered the doctor’s office, only a few minutes before my last life ended, and this new one’d begun.
I turned from him, my eyes back on the road. I said, “You just get us on home.” Il CHAPTER 11.
THE DAYS AFTER NEW ORLEANS WERE DAYS clouded OVER WITH GRIEF, the house empty save for Brenda Kay and me, Annie out back and digging at sweet potatoes, the chore I gave her so that I could sit in an empty house with only my baby. Each and every day I sat in my rocker before the fireplace, holding tight to Brenda Kay, letting her nurse whenever she wanted to, my breast about the only gift I could give her, the curtains pulled closed since the afternoon we made it back from New Orleans. I wanted no light in here, wanted nothing, only the dark. They were terrible days, days filled with nothing other than the weight of the baby in my arms, me waiting for her to die.
Not one of those days went by without the idea in me of putting her away, of giving up whatever gift from God she was. That thought was with me every day, even after the resolve to face thi
s new and ugly world had come to me in the cab of the truck on the way home. I thought of giving her up each day, that word institation a curse and a means of escape at once, so that those two notions the chains of a blessing from God, and the means to escape that blessing were like two huge and awful birds circling me, just waiting for my baby either to live or to die.
And more times than I wanted during those days filled with the idea of escape there came to me the memory of the one time I tried to leave the world God’d deemed the just and correct one for me. Too many times, the house closed up around me, Brenda Kay asleep in my arms, there came to me the one night in late fall, only a few months after Bessy Swansea’d stolen away from me Cleopatra Sinclair, a night like any other, me wide awake in my bed, wondering exactly what I was doing there, which God Missy Cook’s or my own whose plan for my life I was wandering through.
We were in our courses then, taking arithmetic, Latin, grammar, music, all of us in our uniforms and in our assigned chairs and calling out “Present” to each teacher no matter if our minds were there or not. So far the only class I’d really cared for was Latin, in the maze of conjugations and forms and history of the language some deep comfort, refuge from what kept going on every day here, me not being in charge of who I was and where I was going. Suddenly I started in to missing Missy Cook and how it’d really been me in charge there, and in charge of Cathe ral, and in charge of Molly, too. Now look where I was, at any given moment a hall mistress could come in here and lift my nightshirt up and beat whatever Hell out of me she felt certain was there.
At that moment Cleopatra touched my shoulder, whispered close in my ear, “Take what you want with you in your pillowcase, ” and neither her touch nor her words surprised me, all of it only the next logical thing could happen in my life. Here’d come another chance to take charge of it, fix it, the notion big in me that I could grab my life and mend it in ways unimaginable in other people’s heads.
I sat straight up, quietly slipped off my pillowcase, pulled from between the mattress and the springs my tablet and pencil and my photograph, put them into the pillowcase, then reached under the bed and, without thinking of it, picked up my Bible. I hadn’t cracked it open in months, had given up reading every day along about the early part of Daniel, when at Belshazzar’s feast the handwriting appears on the wall. Last April that’d seemed as right a spot to stop as any, the handwriting on the walls before me here at the school indicating that, like King Belshazzar, I’d been weighed and balanced and’d been found by God to be wanting. Still, I didn’t hesitate, only picked up the Bible, dropped it in. I eased out of bed and over to the pine dresser, pulled out the dress I’d worn in here that day in March, put it in the pillowcase, put on my jumper, then my coat. I slipped on the shoes I kept beneath the dresser, and a moment later stood at the door, just behind the two of them.