Sister (24 page)

“My goodness, he's a tiny thing,” Harv says, using the baby voice people adopt without even realizing it, and I love him for it. “How old is he?”

“Three months, three weeks,” I say. “Mom was hoping he'd be born on Sam's birthday, but he held out till the middle of January.”

“Good for him,” Harv says. “It's rotten to share a birthday.” He stares at me fondly, and I stare back. “So what's it like?” he asks. “Having a baby, I mean. Being a parent and all that,” and
I remember him asking me, long ago,
So what is it like to lose your faith
? His voice had been incredulous, almost reverent, eager for my answer. The way it is now.

“It's hard,” I say. “You never really know if you're doing things right.”

“Like serving God,” Harv says.

“Not that bad,” I say. “Babies give you more concrete feedback.”

But Harv doesn't smile. “I envy you,” he says. “I think I would have been good with kids. I sure would have been better at it than my dad was.”

“Or mine,” I say.

It's almost two o'clock. Monica and Ray are walking toward us across the grass, towing children and assorted stuffed animals. “I guess I better let you mingle,” Harv says, and he kisses my cheek. “See you after the service, OK?” While he greets people, I intercept Monica, who introduces me to her boys, David and Donovan. Ray is carrying their third child, four-year-old Daisy, in his arms; she struggles to be put down. By now there are about two dozen people waiting by Sam's grave, and when Harv takes his place beside it, everybody steps into a loose half-circle. Donovan asks me if he can hold Joe.

“Later,” I tell him. “He's sleeping now, OK?” The rush of disappointment sharpening his face makes me want to cry.

“Don't worry about it,” Monica tells me as Donovan hides against her hips. “He's at that age when they take everything personally.”

“And some never outgrow it, believe me,” says a woman standing with a teenage girl who has to be her daughter. The girl blushes, and I remember the exquisite embarrassment I felt at that age, pinned in the spotlight of this cruel, kindly laughter. My mother and Auntie Thil are finally coming to join us, and I desperately want them to hurry, I want this to be over, I can't imagine waiting one moment longer. My mother has a handful of wild
irises. She passes them to me; the stems are wet and pungent. I lift the flowers to my face, but the blossoms themselves have no scent.

“Are you sure that baby's warm enough?” Auntie Thil asks.

“He's fine.”

“It's a long day for such a small baby,” my mother says.

“For kids too,” Auntie Thil says. David is hanging on Monica's purse in the deliberate, dead-weight pose of a very bored child. Donovan has started to cry. Daisy has managed to slip off one shoe, and she stands, sock-footed, in the wet grass. “This isn't going to work,” Ray says to Monica. “I'm taking them inside. We'll meet you afterwards, OK?” She nods, wiping her hand across her forehead in an exaggerated gesture of relief, and he leads the children across the street toward the entrance to the church basement, where, already, volunteers from Ladies of the Altar have set up chairs, spread tables with paper tablecloths, counted scoops of Folgers into tall metal percolators.

“It's a long day for us all,” my mother says to no one in particular, and for the first time she looks down at Sam's grave, at the bright white coffin, which I realize she must have chosen by herself. She removes her glasses, puts them back on. She frowns at the grass, frowns at the sky, fighting tears. Harv has been trying to catch her eye; now, at last, she looks at him, and he clears his throat, hushing us, begins. And still it doesn't seem real, it doesn't seem possible that Sam is really inside this clean white casket. Perhaps there's been a mistake. Perhaps it's somebody else inside, and the real Sam will reappear someday, as happy to see us as my mother always promised, eager to explain. Even now I want more answers than the concrete facts can offer. I want each door of my life to close behind me with a perfect, resonant click.

I drop the irises into Sam's grave and walk away from Harv's words, passing between the rows of gravestones until I reach the edge of the fields. The long furrows are straight as an index finger, pointing at me, urgent, accusing. I lower myself down onto the
damp grass and rock Joe to and fro. Gulls flutter like moths in the distance, fighting the wind, settling down to hunker close against the land. A white cat follows a fence line toward a secret distant point.

After the service, we all walk over to the church and descend the echoing stairwell to the basement. The painted concrete floors have cracked from years of changing seasons. My mother and I stand at the base of the stairs, and a line of mourners forms around us. Suddenly I'm shaking hands with them all. They tell me that I'm looking like my mother. They ask if I still play the piano, and what's my young one's name? Joe wakes up, so I turn him around in his harness. People examine his hands, proclaim that he's inherited my own long fingers.

Eventually, everybody forms a new line in front of the percolators. They sweep my mother along with them, patting her shoulder, pressing her arm. Two long tables are laden with cakes and kuchens and tortes, as if these small, sweet things can somehow erase the bitter aftertaste of grief. Someone hands me a Hello Dolly, still warm from the pan, and when I bite into it obediently, I find that I am strangely comforted, a child slipped a lollipop after a fall. Licking my fingers, I take Joe over to the community playpen that's been set up in the same corner since I was a little girl. Beside it there's a new wicker stand for changing diapers, a sealed bucket marked WASTE, and a few battered toys in a cardboard box. I change him into one of the diapers I stuffed into my coat pocket before we left the house and powder him with cornstarch from a Ziploc Bag. There's already one baby in the playpen, a little girl older than Joe. She chews on a pacifier, widens her eyes in a worried way when I lower him onto his back beside her. “Who's your mother?” I say to her, wanting Joe to hear my voice and relax.

“Jessica Blaunt,” Monica says, sitting down on the floor beside me. She balances a plate filled with brightly colored things:
angel food cake with blue frosting, green finger Jell-O, fudge with rainbow sprinkles.

“Jessica Blaunt?”

“She used to be Jessica Hardy.”

“Oh,” I say, but I don't remember anyone by that name either.

“So.” Monica tugs on one of Joe's feet, then looks at me expectantly.

“What?”

“Inquiring minds want to know.”

“Know what?”

Monica rolls her eyes, then makes an exaggerated sign of the cross over Joe. “Are you going to baptize the little heathen or what?”

“His parents are heathens,” I say, rubbing his firm, round stomach. “He comes from good heathen stock. Besides, Mom doesn't care anymore. She hasn't brought it up since they found Sam.”

“She's probably planning to baptize him herself. Or whisk him away to Father Van Dan on the sly, like my mom did with David. Didn't you hear about that?”

“No,” I say, scanning the room for my mother, but she's out of earshot, helping Ray and Auntie Thil with the kids.

“Well,” Monica says, lowering her voice, “Ray and me, we started going to this Bible church for a while, and when David was born, we decided we'd have him baptized at this big summer ceremony they have at the Waubedon River. My mom kept trying to talk us out of it, but then all of a sudden she seemed to accept it, and I thought it was great that she was respecting my beliefs. But things at the church started getting real intense—people speaking tongues, that kind of stuff—and we thought, no way, and came back to Saint Ignatius. It's
dull
,” Monica says, “but at least you can understand what people are
saying
.” I laugh, and she
laughs too. “Anyway, we called up Father Van Dan and asked if he would baptize David.
What
? he says.
Once wasn't good enough for you
? And that's when we find out that Mom took him to the church the first time she baby-sat.”

“Well, my mom won't be baby-sitting Joe,” I say.

“You always did take this stuff too seriously,” Monica says. “You and Harv. Me, I'd just go ahead and do it. What's the harm? Make your mother happy.”

“It's the principle of the thing.”

“You and Harv,” she says again. “His principles get him in trouble, too. Did you know he got reprimanded by the archbishop? They say he's too liberal, he should straighten out. He's like you, he thinks women should be priests. He thinks gay people should get married”—she whispers the rest of her sentence—“and women should have a choice on abortion.”

“What are you girls so hush-hush about?” my mother says, sitting down beside us. She has a plateful of food to share: more Hello Dollys, fruit cocktail torte, cookies, finger Jell-O. Her plaintive face says,
Take this
, and though I'm not hungry, I eat because I have to, because it would be wrong to say no. The afternoon is passing, and now people are starting to leave. Harv touches Joe's hair, hugs me goodbye; we both promise to be better about keeping in touch. Auntie Thil accepts a ride up the street from Monica and Ray. My mother and I wave them off before going back downstairs to help the volunteers clean up. We fold the paper tablecloths, wipe down the tables, sweep the vast expanse of floor, empty the percolators into the unisex toilet off the hall. When I return the trays and utensils to the kitchen, I see that nothing has changed here since I helped prepare and serve church suppers fifteen years ago. The trays are still kept on the shelving unit behind the door; the utensils go in the row of drawers along the sink. I feel as if I've become my own ghost, moving through the kitchen—bending, opening, stacking, straightening—trapped within this particular memory, destined to repeat myself forever.

And then comes the awkward moment when every last thing has been cleaned and put away. The volunteers are tucked into their jackets. Joe senses the emptiness in the air and begins to fuss, a rasping, breathless sound. Still, my mother isn't ready to go home. I walk him from one side of the basement to the other, while she chats too eagerly with the last volunteer, a woman in her early forties who listens and nods even as her feet take her backward, step by step, toward the stairwell. I offer Joe his pacifier; he spits it out so suddenly that it falls to the floor. “Shit,” I say beneath my breath, trying to pick it up without losing my balance, wishing I'd put him back in his harness so I wouldn't have to worry about dropping him. Suddenly I'm missing Adam, who is strong enough to swing Joe high above his head, who will say, “Give me the baby,” at moments like these, when I'm not sure what to try next. I take Joe with me into the kitchen to wash off the pacifier, and the abrupt, familiar sound of running water temporarily calms him. This time, when I give him the pacifier, he takes it, keeps it, works his mouth over it. I am overwhelmed by an unreasonable sense of accomplishment. I do not want to leave this kitchen. I do not want to face my mother, to watch her return home yet again without my brother, this time without even a miracle to hope for. But when I come back out of the kitchen, she is standing in the middle of the concrete floor. Waiting. “Let's go,” she says, briskly collecting her purse, her sweater. She wears her most private face.

Her car is the last one parked in front of the church. Joe sucks his pacifier; he's overtired, and I'm eager to get him home. The sun has been lost to a glaze of clouds, and there's a strange heavy feeling in the air. My mother drives out of town at her usual quick pace and crosses the railroad tracks into the countryside, heading for Horton, passing feral farmland, rickety corncribs, old clapboard houses. Laundry trembles on drooping wash lines—corsets, undershirts, yellowing slips—the undergarments of widows who are the last living members of farm families that could
once sit down to a noon dinner of fried chicken, potatoes, squash, bread and butter, sauerkraut, and rhubarb pie. Now a single light shines in each window, and it is easy to imagine the meager supper laid out on the table before it gets dark, to save the few cents on electric. Hot cereal, overripe bananas. Day-old bakery from Becker's Foodmart. I see an old dog moving arthritically up the steps of a porch. I see a swaybacked horse grazing a slow circle around two derelict trucks in a pasture gone wild. As we approach the site of the cannery fire, I turn my face away just like my mother always did, thinking about getting Joe fed and bathed and put down to sleep for the night. Thinking about Adam and how good it will be to get back to New York. Thinking about how sorrow is like a vaguely familiar scent, dissipating if you try too hard to identify it, reappearing to return you to places and people you thought you'd left for good. The car slows, and the unexpected motion tugs me forward in my seat.

“What are we doing?” I ask.

My mother has turned down the service road leading to the cannery. She parks behind the burned-out foundation. In the distance, the dark line of the freight tracks follows the highway, playfully, dipping close, curving away. “I used to come here sometimes,” she says. “When you and Sam were kids. I'd stop on my way home from work and sit for a while, think about things. I always worried that someone would drive by and see me.” She opens her door. “Do you want to walk around? There's something I want to tell you.” The wind comes in gusts that rock the car like a cradle.

She waits while I lift Joe out of the car seat, and then we follow her into the scorched foundation of the cannery, stepping over crumbling cinder blocks, charred pieces of wood, broken glass. It's hard not to imagine the snap and snuffle of flames in our footsteps. It's hard not to imagine we are walking on the remnants of bones. Perhaps what we hear are not the close cries of gulls blown in off the lake but the ghost voices of the cannery
girls, high and shrill, filled with pain. The air tastes of ash. My mother stops beside a pile of blackened metal doors, stacked like outdated magazines.