Milk (28 page)

“We were all supposed to act like we didn't notice.”

“That's
crazy.”

“This was after she'd gotten all over us about our table manners and why didn't we like the dinner she served. Lamb croquettes and other dishes kids would never touch in a million years.”

“I thought Evan cooked the meals.”

“At the end maybe. I remember Mom cooking.” Strange to hear her called Mom. “Anyway, Theo, why are we talking about this? There's no point in going over it.”

“Don't you want to know about her letters?” My voice is cracking. “I feel so alone—”

Silence. I guess that means he's listening.

“She hid them in her recipe box, it's—horrible. Like a long, long suicide note. One of them
is
a suicide note.”

Still he doesn't say anything. I hear a sound—is he crying silently? I realize we've never said that word between us, suicide. Never. Not once. We say death, our voices drop an octave. We say she passed away—never, never suicide.

“There's something else,” I say. My voice is so much lower, hoarser. “Something far worse than our mother's suicide.”

I wait for Corb to say
what
. He doesn't.

“Corb, don't you want to know what it is? Corb, it's about Charlotte. Don't you want to know?”

His voice quavers. I am sure he's crying. “I don't know that I do.”

“You don't want me to tell you?” I say.

“No.” His voice turns very cold, very bitter. His answer is a rebuke.

“Well, then, goodbye, Corb.”

“Don't you dare hang up—”

I punch the off button, hurl the phone across the room. The cheap paneled wall quakes.

Maggie is back at my door with Dylan and Willy. “Honey, do you need anything?”

“My brother's an asshole.”

“Do you want to talk about it? Should I come in?” The boys peek out from behind her legs.

“No!”

The boys duck.

“All right, then, I'm going to the store. What can I get you?”

“Ice cream.” Nausea like the first trimester again. I've eaten nothing since the yogurt. “No, Maggie, forget it, nothing. Thanks. And sorry. I just can't … talk yet.”

“Later, then.”

I hear her walk away, sandals slapping and echoing on the cement, Dylan asking a question, her murmured answer.

The baby moves rhythmically in my womb, not a kick, it's down too low and there's no room anymore. Elbows beating like confined wings, fingers drumming in impatience.

I picture Corb hopping into his car, driving down Huntington Drive at ninety miles an hour. An emergency; for the first time in his life he understands my distress, as I understand his. I retrieve the phone, hit the redial button.

“This is Corb Mapes.”

I hang up. Business as usual, the jerk. If the next earthquake hit his house dead center, he would continue to work. My belly feels unusually heavy; it tightens up, Braxton Hicks, but it doesn't release. I lie down for a minute to rest, then get up, find myself some orange juice in my tiny refrigerator, and a hunk of French bread. Eat it dry. Margarine is too much of an effort.

“Take it easy, baby,” I say, stroking my belly, trying to get the Braxton Hicks to release. “Hang in there.”

Throwing the sheets and towels off the mounds of debris, I pick around for my mother's letters, heartlessly throwing aside the platinum blond doll's feet and head in my search. Recipes, torn linens—this is taking too long. I go to the garage and get a rake, raking everything out into the center of the floor.

At the Sierra Madre post office, I insure the package I'm sending to my brother. I wonder why I don't just drop it by his house, but I know why. I can't see him now.

“How much do you want to insure it for?” the clerk says.

“What's the limit?”

“Five hundred dollars.”

“Good. I'll do that.”

She looks at me strangely; a black woman. I look back with what I hope is an impassive gaze as she slips the packet of Xeroxed letters into the overnight delivery package addressed to Corb. A confession of murder, of infanticide, I'm thinking: here I am mailing my mother's murder confession to my brother. His inaudible sorrow.

“Will that be all?” she asks.

I imagine my mother sitting on the barstool by our kitchen phone, near the cabinet where the recipe box was kept; writing late at night, after my father has gone to bed, one small light on. Writing what she could, when she could, a tumbler of crème de menthe beside her, then hurriedly folding the letter, not dating it, lifting the metal bar of the recipe box and shoving the letter inside.

“Yes,” I say, “that will be all.” Earlier I stood at the little office supply shop around the corner, Xeroxing these letters, three of everything so there's a set of letters for Corb, for my father, and for Aunt Lyla. Every so often I had to pause, one hand on the copier for balance, the other on my belly. It doesn't hurt exactly, it's as though I've got a snake wrapped around me, a python squeezing gently. Walking is a challenge. Now, as I make my way to the car, my belly tightens up all over again, the snake feeling.

This is where I have to go today:

—my appointment with Maggie to make absolutely sure I'm okay

—a stop at Fedco, I hardly have anything for the baby

—the bank, I'm low on money

Just a normal day of errands. Should I stop at the police station, show them the letters? How does one turn in a dead person for murder?

It occurs to me again that I didn't tell Maggie what my mother said in her letters. Can't say the words out loud yet.

Nor can I do these errands. I drive past the bank, keep going, drive past Fedco. Can't go back to the pool house either; it's like a husk I've discarded and suddenly I know for a fact that I won't have my baby there. I can't. A fine time to decide this, what am I supposed to do about it now, mere weeks before my due date? It's the wrong place, I'm thinking frantically. Too dark, too small, all wrong, and now with all that crap in there. Ripped-up tablecloths and a trashed dollhouse and my mother's recipes all over the place. Even if I could clean it out, which I can't summon the energy to do, I still don't want the baby there. No. Out of the question.

Instead I imagine a freshly painted white room, wood floors swept clean.

The house I will rent with Gregg. Gregg. I haven't talked to him in more than twelve hours, when he brought over the stuff from Pink's; he has no idea what's happened to me and I don't know how to explain to him, where to begin.

No, it's all too exhausting. Everything.

Never mind about Gregg. I feel a lifting in my heart at the thought of those wooden floors and the white-painted walls. I almost stop for a paper so I can look for a new place,
that
place, but it's futile now, too late. I don't even have any baby stuff, only the two blankets I ordered. No crib, no baby clothes, although Maggie and Diane have offered to take me shopping.

I'll be lucky if I manage to pick up a package of diapers in time for the birth.

Lightheaded, I drive around aimlessly, the baby very still. Space is too tight, especially when I'm sitting upright like this; the baby's feet are hooked over the bottom of my ribcage. Periodically I pull over and readjust the seat, trying to get some relief. My feet and ankles are swelling again. Look at them! Pickled logs. I know what Maggie would say to that: drink water. Which doesn't make any sense. Aren't I just swimming in fluids already?

It's then that I remember my appointment with her. I'm more than an hour late. Why go now? Nor can I seem to will myself to find a phone booth, call Maggie, try to explain, drive over there.

Just go. Now
. But I keep driving aimlessly, what difference does it make? Down Lake, across California Boulevard, cut over toward the Huntington Museum, circle around to that hilly part of San Marino we used to call Disneyland: Tudor homes with small turrets or the occasional waterless water wheel, lots of Spanish-style mansions with red clay roofs, olive trees, ersatz Mission Bells. I ride the brake down Shenandoah, then it's back up to Pasadena, to the Grove, my father's new home.

Because I know I have to face him.

No place to park in front, so I park in back, then wind my way backwards through the building, down hallways with handrails and peach vinyl wallpaper—a home for old people despite the advertised plush “apartments,” the Olympic-sized swimming pool, the meticulously landscaped “campus.” There is still the just-banished odor of day-old pudding, incontinence, loneliness. I choke up every time I come here, at the prospect of my father spending the rest of his days here.

But today when I enter his apartment, to my surprise, I momentarily regain the part of myself I lost since going to Pink's yesterday. After all, nothing here has changed. In his small living room my father sits in a chair reading with his magnifying glass, exactly as before; as always, he acts slightly disappointed to see me.

“Weren't you just here?”

“That was two days ago, Dad.”

I expect him to notice: to see what's on my face and ask me what is wrong. At the very least notice the folder in my hand and ask what it is.

But he doesn't.

I pull up a chair, our legs almost touching, and think of my usual topics: funny stories about Dylan and Willy, or that I talked to Corb.

“I went through the stuff at Pink's,” I say. “It's all sorted.”

“Oh?”

“Only some of it's destroyed now. Never mind, Dad.” His face contorts in confusion. “I'm joking. Sort of. I'm having a lot of Braxton Hicks. I don't suppose you know what those are.”

“No.”

Weeks ago, I asked him if he wanted to be present when the baby was born.

“Why would I want to do
that?
” he said.

“You've never seen it before. I thought you might be curious.”

“I know where babies come from, thank you,” he said.

No getting around it, he's himself, a product of his generation. And he's going to be a negligent grandfather, the same as he's been with Corb's boys.

“Why was I so frightened as a child, Dad?”

“Why?”

“Yes, why. All those nights I woke up screaming, so loud the neighbors could hear me.”

“I don't know.”

“You didn't ever ask yourself why I was frightened?”

Silence.

“Why did my mother kill herself?”

He looks at his TV expectantly, as if anticipating it will go on automatically and enlighten him.

“Dad. How did Charlotte die?” My tears spill over, my fingers pressed to my eyeballs so tightly I can feel the round gelatinous shape of them.

Dad's knee shakes so hard, it shudders.

I get up to close the door, then I stand before the TV and prepare to him tell everything.

But I find that I can't. He's not the person to tell. He's too old now, too fragile. Too broken by loss—his own father, his wife, his infant daughter.

Instead I ask him, “What was it like when your father died?” I sit on the floor beside him. I rest my cheek on his knee.

“He died right in front of me, you know. There was nothing I could do. It was the middle of the Depression,” he says. “I never got over it. He was a good man, a good father. He loved me and I loved him.”

He strokes my hair with trembling fingers. If he was so loved by his father, I'm thinking, he must be strong enough to take my mother's letters. Perhaps he already suspects the truth, perhaps not. But I know I will never show those letters to him.

T
WENTY
-S
IX

I let myself in the back door calling out, “Yoo hoo! Aunt Lyla!”

No answer, but of course she's here. Sure enough, there's something in the oven, foil-wrapped, and sun tea in the refrigerator, and her car keys and cigarettes on the kitchen counter.

I stand at the bottom of the stairs. “Aunt Lyla, it's me! Theo!”

A slight sound: pen on paper, a stamp being licked, a foot emerging from a bathtub.

“Aunt Lyla, I'm coming up.” (My father's voice harping, Don't you think you should've called first? Don't make her fix you lunch! You don't just barge into somebody's bedroom—)

That's exactly what I do. She's standing in her closet in her bra and panties figuring out what to wear, as I've seen her do thousands of times, and as always I study the diminutive hips, the potbelly, the nimble legs, trying to see my mother in her, what my mother might've looked like at this age, had she lived.

“Aunt Lyla.”

“Hello. My, look at you! You're huge!” She busses my cheek, then goes back to scrutinizing a red sleeveless blouse on a hanger, no doubt thinking about accessories—a scarf or necklace, earrings. “Won't you stay for lunch? Nothing fancy, just some leftover ham and cantaloupe, a little salad, some rolls.”

“I'll stay. Thanks.” I'm clasping the folder of letters to my chest, waiting for her to notice. I'm breathing hard, partly from climbing her stairs, partly nerves.

She turns away to dress. “Is it warm out?”

“Broiling.”

“And being pregnant, I suppose, only makes it worse.” She sighs as though she hadn't been through this herself. Twins, no less. “When is your due date again? In a couple of weeks, isn't it?”

“Three and a half weeks.”

“It'll be over before you know it, dear. Next thing you know, you'll be seeing him or her off to college.”

“Aunt Lyla.”

“Yes, dear?” In tiny bare feet, she pads right past me toward her shoe closet.

“Can we talk?”

“Why, of course.” She slips on white high-heeled sandals and stands before me, her scarf like a flag fluttering. Red, white, and dark violet—an almost patriotic ensemble. “Shall we sit?” she asks.