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“But where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
“You need to rest. Are you ready to see him?”
“Please. I am.”
At Raoul’s request, the nurses brought the shriveled and squalling newborn to Jacki, tightly swaddled in a white hospital cotton blanket, a blue band decorating his ski
“They’re perfect,” she said. “Ten toes. Look, Kat. All good.”
“Perfect,” Kat agreed.
Wrinkled and of an alarmingly bright pink hue, he was mostly bald, but Kat was as mesmerized by his velvety pate as Jacki. She reached out a tentative hand and rested it on the downy head. His skin felt moist, warm, and pliant under her touch.
Rather efficiently, the baby found Jacki’s nipple and clamped on. “It might hurt a little at first,” said the nurse. “Of course, you’ll toughen up.”
“Look, Kat. What a beautiful child. Do you believe it?”
“Be glad he’s healthy even though he’s small,” said the nurse. “One lady tonight had a baby with heart problems. He’ll need an operation before he can go home.”
Jacki kissed the baby’s head gently, as if conferring a blessing. “Send her flowers! Send her money for a college education!”
Raoul held her and his son, all together in one big bundle. When Jacki nodded off at last, Kat and Raoul had a wonderful time holding and passing the bundle back and forth and drinking freely from a bottle of chilled champagne Raoul had scored somewhere. The baby slept calmly in his bassinet by the side of the bed, as if perfectly comfortable already with his new surroundings.
“You did it,” Kat said. “You gave me a nephew, Raoul. Thank you.”
He stroked the boy’s cheek, who instantly rooted, searching for a nipple, hoping for more. He sucked his father’s baby finger, temporarily mollified. “What if-imagine me raising him without her. Alone.”
“You would never be alone.”
“I hope that’s true.”
“I might not have the colostrum but I have the will. No harm will come to this one, not when I’m around.” Hearing the fierceness in her own voice made her almost embarrassed.
“I’ll go get us a pizza,” Kat said later. They ate, and Raoul slept, and Kat watched Jacki wake up twice to take pills and feed her little one. The nurses didn’t bother them much. The door was closed and the small, plain room with its medical equipment and sleepers felt as beautiful as the Taj Mahal.
When Jacki woke up again at almost four in the morning and began feeding her baby, Kat left, but not before Jacki had the last word, as usual.
“I wish you could have this feeling,” she said wistfully, “that life goes on, and it’s good.”
She would admit to silver linings, Kat thought, punching the elevator button, new muscles, new life.
Kat had told Ray to pick her up at her work at nine-thirty that evening, but she wasn’t there. Ray missed her. He wanted to talk to her, had been holding on so that he could talk to her.
He looked at his watch again. Too late. She had abandoned him. This pressure in his chest-he had brought the tapes to play for her. They radiated on the seat beside him. He gave up and turned on the ignition, the infernal sound that punctuated all their days and nights.
Ray arrived at Memory Gardens in Brea after the sun sank, the great gardens of the cemetery, their grasses and plaques, immutable no matter what the light. The marker for Henry Jackson reposed in the crematorium. “How we miss him,” the simple script read, then showed dates of his birth and death, the death date close to Ray’s second birthday.
He didn’t believe that death date anymore. His father had died later; he was begi
She hadn’t loved his father. He was begi
He wondered why Esmé had bothered with this memorial marker. She had told Ray his father’s ashes had been scattered by his great-aunt in New York. Maybe she had put it there for him, with a fake death date. She had told him about it years ago, but he couldn’t remember ever coming here with her. Ray had come a few times on his own, during those times when he felt the great pressure about the moves.
She was only trying to protect me, he thought, but I’m a man now. The lying becomes another kind of poison.
He put a bundle of tulips near the marker because there was no place for flowers. He had bought them at a florist just past the off-ramp, bright shiny green leaves with soft curling white flowers at the centers.
“I brought these,” he told the marker, “because it’s a celebration. You’re dead, safely dead, and that’s a blessing, it seems.” He hadn’t cared about his own kid enough to let him grow up in peace. Why had his father terrorized them? Sexual jealousy? He imagined he could guess. He couldn’t let go of a wife, felt insulted when she rejected him. He felt enraged.
Just like Ray had felt when Leigh cheated on him.
He pushed the thought down, and studied the marker.
“You ruined my childhood with your craziness. You made my mother live in fear. We were never free. We lived like outlaws, always ru
He felt the vast emptiness, surrounded by the dead and his own dead hopes. Every boy without a father probably harbors a secret illusion that his father would have been one of the good guys, if only. He’d load up a camper with ca
The time they had together would embed memories so deep, even if the man died, the boy could spend the rest of his lifetime savoring and honoring him.
When Ray had been very young, he had such fantasies. He knew it now because they rushed over him, threatening to drown him. He wondered what his own gravestone might say if Leigh had decided the words.
Ray didn’t even know what kind of work his father had done at the bank. Teller? CEO?
He leaned forward, clearing dust out of the engraved words with a finger. His mother, helped by a hundred scholarships large and small, along with student loans that ran into the tens of thousands, had managed to bring him up and educate him alone, with a baying hound at her heels, always on the lookout.
He owed her so much, everything that had turned out right in his life. Especially his work. Thank her and thank God for it. He loved what he did.
Now Ray had his fine education from Whittier College to fall back on, not to mention graduate school at Yale, which had forced his mother into working two jobs for many years. At least now, he could help her. At least now, she worked because she liked it, so she said, because she liked the people and needed the structure.
Somewhere inside, hadn’t he always suspected he had a bad father? His own badness had to come from somewhere, the fear and anger he had tried to hide from Leigh, from everyone.
“Good-bye, Henry Jackson,” he told his father, turning away. “You bastard.”