Search Party (21 page)

Elizabeth is lying on her side on the gurney with her head on a big snowy pillow so crisp it looks like paper. It is paper. Her legs are drawn up and her arms bent close to her body. Her eyes are open but she pays no attention to Capri. Her pink pajamas are on the counter, and the line of a hanging IV pouch is plugged into the back of her hand, which is taped to a little board. Another tube comes out from under the hospital gown. Coming close Capri
says, “It's OK, Lizzie.” The usual pinched expression has been wiped off the girl's face by her open mouth and the flush that puffs out her skin. The complaining feeling that always hangs in the air around her is not there. Again Capri whispers her name.

She slides her fingers into the damp hair and lifts it back from the forehead, laces it carefully behind the red rim of the ear, and looks for a long time. The ear, ribbed and glowing, reminds her of the inner leaves in a head of cabbage. How strange, these leaves on the side of the head. How strange the head is, in fact. Objects on it like little vegetables, if you look at them.

And people think faces are beautiful, and think of them, certain faces, all the time, she thinks bitterly. The child's face comes back together as a face, but there is something unpleasant in it, even so. It looks stretched downward and fierce, as children look straining to go to the bathroom.

“Lizzie,” she says. “They're going to make you feel better now.” With that, a certainty rushes over her that the things that could make Elizabeth feel better will not happen.

You can't make anything happen, Capri tells her silently. You can't make your mom and dad come right now. You think they don't like you and maybe they don't for some reason. But now you're sick. It will be different, when they come. If you died, they'd be different people. Capri can see them. No longer dressed up, full of instructions. No more shining shoes, heels, earrings. No. Tear-streaked, tired, swatted down. She could almost cry for what Mr. Yates will feel if he remembers his good-bye to his daughter last night, so long ago. He will have to regret it forever. She is visited by a brief joy as fierce as Elizabeth's clamped face.

She stops. I don't mean die. I don't mean that. They can't help it.

The young man comes into the room to wheel the gurney away. “Now wait a minute, this one ain't yours, I know that,” he says.

She steps away from his wide smile. Something exercises in her chest, like air in a sticking balloon, a sensation she hopes is not the beginning of tears. He throws his hip against the table
and wheels it in a circle, a tray with Elizabeth on it. Capri sees the soles of Elizabeth's feet, and the jiggling bag of liquid. She sees that Elizabeth has athlete's foot: peeling toes and cracks in the red skin at their base, and wonders if anyone but herself and the orderly have noticed this about her. It seems her duty for the moment to notice everything, in the absence of anyone else. She is struck by the separateness of each member of the Yates family, including the baby asleep out there, now in Charlene's arms, giving off his odors like a secret he easily shares. When you breathe on his head it breathes back at you the scent of a sweet roll. No idea who is holding him. No idea, ever, if someone should steal him now, of where he came from. The lack of any use to each other, any protection, that they are, his family. All out in the night at once, scattered. Any one of them could be steered down a hall to an elevator with the wrong person responsible.

She imagines her own father stretched on such a table. He would be lying straight and not in such disorder as Elizabeth. She grabs for the scene as it recedes. At the same time she drops a short way down, into a knowledge that he
is
somewhere. Not suspended just out of reach of her mind, but existing—sick or well, putting on his clothes, eating, driving with the radio on. If he's in the same time zone he's asleep right now. Asleep as if nothing were happening. Groggily her thoughts swerve away.

She has to get back to the baby. She wishes they had let her bring him in with her, with his sweet smell and his luck of being the second-born, the one at ease. Was there some way to transmit the luck of one life into another?

The gurney, like one of those jamming grocery carts that do not seem built to go on their swiveling wheels, takes its awkward path to the elevator, carrying Elizabeth. The elevator doors close. Charlene puts the baby back in her arms and she sits in a chair uncomfortable for sitting with a baby because of the metal arms. Pushing the chair out of the way with her foot she lowers herself onto the blue-green carpet and leans back against the wall, letting the baby sink onto her legs. She looks up at the bulb in the lamp and closes her eyes. Her ears are ringing.

She can feel him against her legs and in her wrists and hands as she steadies him, but gradually she feels herself broadening out, her limbs going slack. She puts her head back, under the lamp. Behind her lids everything is dark, with the lightbulb still there in gold, moving slowly out of sight like a ship, and then fan-shapes, outlined in a bright blue-green, begin to rise and fall all over the background color. Now and then she can hear the movement of people around her and even the bubbling of the aquarium at the far end of the room. She watches the scene behind her eyelids. Now there are gold tracks all over the dark color. Everything is far off. She is not waiting. I'm here, she thinks. I'm in the Blue Grotto.

Later or Never

O
N
the days Lawrence could walk, Cam sat with him in the old grade school. His house had a ramp but there were days when he could do stairs, and they would negotiate the seams and curbs of two blocks of sidewalk and the school's railed steps in order to drink coffee at a table in the entrance hall.

In place of the children who had worn the edge off the marble steps in two troughs, the high-ceilinged classrooms now held shops and restaurants. Sometimes those old children could be seen standing up close to photographs hung in the corridors, pointing themselves out, prim or devilish at their desks. “See those holes? Those are inkwells,” they would be saying with a hopeless pride, to kids who must be their grandchildren. Great-grandchildren. Cam thought the kids in the pictures looked like orphans. Dressed up, dark around the eyes, staring with grins and scowls into a time in which the classroom, the teacher, and they themselves in their bunched-up plaid shirts and bloused dresses did not exist. Yet there they were behind glass, jittering in rows like kids anywhere, waiting to be let out the doors and onto the buses lined up in one of the pictures on their bicycle-sized tires.

“Did they all wear white?” Cam wanted to know. “The girls?”

“Little brides,” said Lawrence, tipping back his head. “Brides of knowledge.” He raised one of his eyebrows at her.

“So how did you keep clean if you went to school in a white dress?”

“Clean wasn't so big, then.”

Cam didn't say, “How do you know?” After all, she asked these questions. And Lawrence had an interest in many subjects far afield of his own, which was French literature of some time period.

He was squinting out the open doors at the hedge that bounded the parking lot. He spoke a line in French. “A poem,” he explained.

“Yeah,” she said. She could have said, “I mean, look at your face. French poem.”

“The blue sky. The blue sky is God, the only difference being that it exists. The hedge, the sun over there? All in a poem.” This seemed to please and agitate him at the same time. She hoped he would not recite the poem.

The hedge was seething with tiny birds. His eyes were giving out on him but he always noticed the same things she did; like her, he was always on the lookout for something. Something sudden but expected.

For Lawrence, she could see later, the thing watched for would have been more specific than it was for her: some change in the course of what was happening to him. He had the kind of MS in which the body rapidly divorced the brain. She knew about it from a semester on disabilities; it was the worst form but there was a chance of reversal. She told him that. She should have known that instead of arguing he would bring in his poet. His poet was Mallarmé, the subject of his book, the one he had published as opposed to the two rubber-banded stacks of paper in liquor store boxes in the closet.

“Chance, yes,” he said. “Not
a
chance. A throw of the dice never will abolish chance. ‘Le hasard.'
Le
hasard.” She knew
hasard
; she had a string of French words now. She knew when he was quoting; she knew when it was his poet because of the way he held up both weakened hands like a conductor, two fingertips of the right just meeting the thumb.

His book had received one review, and she knew the name of the person who had written it. Lindenbaum. “He did say it wasn't a biography, but by
Jesús
”—he always pronounced it the Spanish way and then apologized because Cam was Catholic—“the man knew his Mallarmé.”

“If it wasn't a biography what was it?” At one time she had expected he would give her a copy of it but he never did. She knew where the copies were, in another box in the closet.

“
Une vie
.”

They had both seen the birds swoop in, dozens of them, and make themselves invisible in the hedge, so it seemed to be shifting of its own accord. “God of the weak,” Lawrence whispered. “God of the little birds, protect them now.” To Cam's mother, the way he looked saying this would have been proof he was crazy. But Cam knew these prayers of his. He liked to put his palms together and roll up his eyes. It was something he did when they were watching the news. “Oh God, we ask that you turn the general, as he testifieth before the Congress, to stone. Also the attaché with the briefcase.”

“Fob,” he was explaining. “The prayer for the birds. Fob, who wrote about animal life.”

“Fob,” she said obediently.

“F-A-B-R-E. He's saying a prayer that the owl won't snatch the bird.” With his better hand he made a snatching motion. “Snatch the mouse. Fabre doesn't hold it against the owl, even as he describes how it's done. Every chew. Except of course an owl does not chew. He swallows. Vomits out the little bones et cetera.”

“Whatever it is, somebody's gonna know all about it,” Cam said. “And then tell you.”

“You're right.” He said it warmly, turning to face her. He liked exasperation. He was a child that way, always goading somebody, a teacher or a mother. She knew that.

“There's that face,” he said, something his mother also said to Cam on occasion. “That baby look,” he said. “Know how a baby, certain kind of baby, won't smile at you? That baby will . . .
she'll drink your blood before she'll smile at you. You could turn inside out and she would just look. And you know she thinks you're already inside out, you're so ugly and frightening and you smell.”

“I don't think that.”

“To a baby we smell like zoo animals. To a baby.” His face emptied, the way it often did when he remembered something not connected to a book, and he turned away, so she was able to do a mental drawing of his profile. His skin was sweaty and drained of blood, almost the gray of a pearl. A freshwater pearl, like her grandmother's present. When she was in her cap and gown, her grandmother had fastened the strand for her. It barely met around her neck. It burst the same night, when she went off to drink beer with Ray Malala. Ray had been her friend since St. Benedict's, the new fat boy in third grade, because both their fathers had died. By high school Ray was a DJ everybody wanted at parties, and a football player. By then being Samoan was a plus. He got her the place as the team water-girl. The guys liked her but they didn't get around to going out with her. Ray, on the other hand, had acquired a fair amount of experience over the years. “All right, listen, Cami,” he told her when he took her home after graduation, “don't you be doing no more stuff like that right now. Hear me? I'll tell your brother. Here's your beads.”

A freshwater pearl had dents, though, and Lawrence's face, familiar to her eye and her mind's eye, was uncommonly smooth, except for one crease between the eyebrows. No one would read his age in the features, which, despite the cheeks rounded by prednisone, reminded her of the smooth, heavy-lidded face of Rose of Lima. He had the same look of secret pride and refusal. The picture of Rose in her First Communion book,
Our Saints and How They Lived
, was of a statue. The tapered plaster fingers didn't even have knuckles; this was Rose before she dipped her hands in lime so as to scar them. Cam's Communion class drawing of the face of Rose, sleepy and secretive under a crown of roses, had stayed on the refrigerator until it curled around the
magnets. For weeks after her father's funeral she would check it for a miracle. Rose of Lima's miracles were not listed in
Our Saints
, though she had performed them or caused them to happen or she wouldn't be a saint, and as not only Dominicans but Jesuits too had sworn, more angel than human. Even then, Cam knew herself to be half-pretending to expect, and finally faking the expectation, that Rose's lowered eyes might open. If they had, it would have meant her father had arrived in heaven, if there was a heaven.