The Garden of Lost and Found (36 page)

“Parker?”

“And Parker.”

I looked at the urn. It was huge and dull and gray and…
ugly
. I looked at Claudia.

“But
why?
”

“Damn it, Jamie, does everything have to be but why with you? Can’t you ever answer a question without asking it first?”

John had said that too, and I was about to tell Claudia that but the stopper had been pulled from her throat and the revelations poured out like wine.

“She was fucking him, Jamie. Parker was your mother’s slice of jungle fever. An eighteen-year-old black kid from the ghetto the mysterious white lady would take up to her rooms. You want to know what ruined Parker? It wasn’t drugs—the fucking drugs came after. It was your bitch of a mother, Jamie. And look at the two of us. Even from beyond the grave, Jamie. Even dead she’s ruining our lives.”

And how do you answer that? How do you even keep up with it, stand up under its weight? I didn’t; I couldn’t. I just went back to our standby. I pointed to the urn.

“Is
this
what we were looking for?”

And Claudia laughed. “That’s good, Jamie. Real good. Jamie,
look at that.
” She too pointed to the urn, her finger shaking as if she were trying to hold up its leaden weight. “He’s
dead
. Why in the hell should I waste five months of my life trying to find him?”

“But he’s your brother.”

“That is not my brother, Jamie, any more than these goddamned shoes”—she pointed down at them as though they were farther away than her feet—“are the little black kid who taught you there are worse fates in life than your own.”

“Claudia—”

“No, Jamie, no more. I am sick and tired of this shit, sick and tired of the madness of this place. I’m beginning to think it’s something in the air. You, your mother, Endean, even me: anyone who spends any time here goes fucking nuts. I might as well have thrown in my lot with Reggie, or just stayed in my father’s house. He may be shriveled up like a prune but at least he’s not crazy like the rest of you.”

Panting for breath then, she reached for Parker’s urn. She pulled old death against new life, and the combined weight was almost too much for her to lift. She tried half a dozen times, finally had it in her arms. She held it like a baby, let it rest on top of her stomach. She turned slowly, carefully; I could hear Divine’s shoes
squelch beneath the weight, but still, I made no move to help her. She walked away with a zombie’s slow blind steps, and I watched her go. I let her go. In my head she made it even, made it all the way up two flights of stairs, made it into a cab and all the way back to her father’s house and her father’s open arms, ensconced her disgraced brother on the family mantle with his good sibling and their dearly departed mother.

But my mother’s jigsaw house had a different plan. A half-rotted corner of rug tripped her before she’d gone six steps. There was a couch there, thank God—I don’t want to know what would’ve happened if her body had landed on thinly carpeted concrete—but Parker’s urn thudded on the floor and rolled toward a corner of the room.

I braced myself for the impact, as if when it struck the wall all of No. 1 would come tumbling down on us. But there was no impact, no collapse. There was just:

“Jamie.”

Something in her voice. I let myself take a step toward her.

“Claudia?”

“Jamie,” she said again. “I think you’d better get the suitcase.”

I HELPED HER UP TWO FLIGHTS of stairs, left her sitting on a wooden crate with the words “Product of Rhodesia” stenciled on its side; by the time I’d returned with the suitcase Nellydean was there.

“This is for after,” she was saying, handing Claudia a tear-shaped leather pouch the size of a parking meter. “This is for during,” she said, giving her a mason jar of green liquid. “Just small sips,” she said, “spoonfuls,” and she handed Claudia two polished silver spoons, one adult size, one hardly larger than a mustard paddle. “And this is for before.” She leaned close and kissed Claudia four times, on her right cheek, her forehead, her left cheek, her lips—counterclockwise, I noted, as if she could turn back time. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, and reached a hand into a pocket of her dress and withdrew a golden rectangle of cloth, its borders edged with red and green embroidery. “This is for the baby. Don’t let the nurses tell you no. If a newborn can’t be with his mother he at least needs to have something of her with him.”

“Oh, Aunt Endean.” Claudia’s cheeks shone with a high, polished light. “I wish you’d come.”

Nellydean just shook her head and backed away, a stricken expression on her face, and in the cab Claudia was giddy, practically hysterical. She only stopped laughing to spit out some inanity at the driver.

“Oh my God I
love
your turban!” She burst into giggles and the giggles turned into ows, ow-ow-ow, and she made an attempt at what I think was controlled breathing and then she said, “What’s that smell? Is it frankincense? Or cardamom? Are you eating dinner up there?”

She tried to lean forward to put her face through the window but couldn’t. For his part the cabbie kept saying, “Not in my cab, please, not in my cab. You waited nine months, now please, wait ten minutes more. Just ten minutes more.”

It fell apart at the hospital. Not just Claudia’s composure, but the whole charade: it fell apart as soon as the triage nurse asked for the name of Claudia’s obstetrician and Claudia said, “I don’t have one.”

It was the triage nurse who actually said, “Girl, what have you been doing for the past nine months?” All I could manage was her name.

“Claudia?”

“Shut up, Jamie,” Claudia said, very calmly. To the triage nurse, she said, “I’m in labor. I need to have a cesarean. I don’t know what you have to do to make that happen but you have to make it happen
now
.”

I grabbed her arm. “Claudia, what the hell is going on?”

She whirled on me. I thought she was going to slap me the way she’d slapped me that day in the car, but her words hit even harder. “Get the fuck away from me, Jamie. I never want to see you again.”

The waiting room was windowless, its white walls glistening under the fluorescent lights. After nearly a year in No. 1 its antiseptic purity was unbearable. I sat on a couch whose mottled upholstery was so durable it scratched the backs of my legs through what was left of my pants. The plants in the room were plastic, fake palm fronds waxed to an oily sheen, the tables made of some particle board concoction no more solid than a sandcastle’s walls. Oh, it was dry as a desert, that room, and I longed for the fine old stink of my mother’s buried house, the plainer truths of stone and wood, paper, dust, mold. I had to fight the urge to run—the revolting prospect of convalescing in such a place was only topped by the prospect of failing there—but Claudia’s suitcase anchored me with the weight of Nellydean’s gifts: before and during and after. The worn leather was soft and warm beneath my fingers, and when I brought it to my nose it smelled like leather, and like the shop—dust laid on top of mold, a dry but spicy smell like cinnamon in coffee. When I fell asleep it was with my cheek resting on its smooth surface, and when I woke up my shadow remained there, painted with sweat on Claudia’s suitcase as Divine’s had been painted with soot on the passenger seat of Lily Windglass’s second-best car.

I awakened to the sound of a conversation between a nurse and a doctor. “Complications” was the first word I remember hearing, but I could only make out bits of what they were saying, something about lack of prenatal care, high fevers, low birth weight, then, clearly: “Hemorrhaging.” Who was in trouble, I wondered, Claudia or the baby? But all I could make out was: malnutrition, hypoglycemic shock, toxic accumulations in the liver, kidneys, brain, blood barrier. But Claudia? Or the baby? Incubation, intubation. ICU, emergency transfusions, conversion still a possibility.

“Claudia?” I demanded. “Or the baby?”

One of the nurses looked up at me as if she’d forgotten I was there.

“Ms. MacTeer is resting comfortably, Mr. Ramsay, but she asked not to be disturbed. Her son was born at three-fifty this morning.” A puzzled expression crossed the nurse’s face then. “She asked for her pouch?”

I retrieved it from the suitcase. “Here, let me.”

The nurse shook her head. She took the pouch, opened it.

“Ginger snaps! What a good idea!” She took one for herself. “He’s in the viewing room, if you’re interested.”

“He?”

The nurse looked down at her clipboard, looked back up at me.

“Divine?”

And there he was: Divine, version 2.0. He was no bigger than a grocery bag that had been rolled into a wrinkled spiral, and as I looked at him through the glass I suddenly understood why we call them newborns rather than youngborns: because nothing looks as old as an infant. It’s not the age of a person we see, a personality, but the age of the species itself. It’s as if each new life requires the shedding of an old one. Looking at Claudia’s Divine, I could almost see the other Divine, see him being wrung out of this body like water from a cloth. This lumpy sponge was all that was left, but in its tiny twitching limbs I could see it reaching out for its own water, its own chance to swell.

I could see all that, but I couldn’t see Claudia anywhere.

NELLYDEAN ROUSED FROM SLEEP at the bell’s ring, saw me, saw the suitcase in my hand. She nodded at me to open the suitcase and when she saw the jar she’d given Claudia six hours before, the square of cloth, she just shook her head.

“At least she ate the cookies.”

She went to a shelf, opened the dusty lid of a brass-hinged wooden cozy and pulled from it two tiny teacups, nearly translucent in the dawn light. In that single gesture I finally realized Claudia had been telling the truth: there was no treasure. Nothing was hidden in No. 1. Though it might hold hundreds of secrets, thousands, nothing in this building was hidden to Nellydean. The treasure had been nothing more than a story she’d perpetuated so she could stay a little longer among the things she loved.

Now she pointed at the mason jar and I brought it to her. She opened it and poured us each a cup, held one out to me.

“It ain’t nothing,” she said in a voice that was broken, defeated. “It’s just peppermint tea.”

And it was just peppermint tea, but it was also still hot, and as we sat there sipping it silently, the tears rolling down Nellydean’s cheeks, I found myself thinking of all the things parents say to their children.
Speak up!
they say, and
Pipe down!
Wash your hands after you use the bathroom
and
Don’t talk with your mouth full
.
Look both ways before crossing the street
,
they caution, and, handing over the birthday present,
You said you liked the blue one, right?
How many
Yes
’s and
No
’s a child hears from its parents, how many
Say
please
’s and
Give your grandma a
kiss
’s and
It is
not
all right to use that word, even at home
.
Jupiter is the largest planet
, they say, and they add,
I think
, and they do think, these parents, and say, they speak to their children, they offer them the words my parents never offered me. “The words,” I say, but I mean the word, the single word, exhortation and admonition, the prayer hiding behind
Tell Jimmy he can ride his
own
bicycle down that steep hill
and
If Charlotte’s mother lets Charlotte wear that dress it’s nobody’s fault but her own
and all those countless other codes and catch-phrases that now, I finally realize—finally, because I never heard them, never learned the code until after my own childhood was over, until, in other words, it was too late—boil down to one word, without which a child is like an anchorless boat in rough seas, charging always forward because he cannot stop. And that word is:
Live
.

Nellydean stood up when she’d finished her cup of tea. “It’s times like this you want somebody to blame. But they ain’t nobody to blame except maybe God himself. Or Claudia,” Nellydean said then. “I guess we could always blame Claudia, but what’s the use in that?”

five

THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN something wrong with her. In these scenes there’s always something wrong with her. How to say this? I
wanted
there to be something wrong with her, because even though we’d spent half a year avoiding any real intimacy we’d done it together. We might not have learned anything about each other but we’d learned about other things, together. We’d held each other’s hand as we wandered through the dark recesses of the basement; we’d gotten lost together, and however bad that was it was still better than being lost alone.

But there was nothing wrong with her. She simply refused to talk to me.

They kept her in the hospital one night, for observation, then kept Divine in after she left, for further tests. It turned out Claudia had miscalculated the date of his conception and he wasn’t really early, but he was still underweight and had difficulty digesting formula, and his lungs, though fully formed, were still weak. None of which meant there was anything wrong with him, only that there might be. But Claudia wouldn’t talk about him either. When she came home from the hospital I followed her up four flights of stairs but no matter what I said she refused even to look at me. When she got to my mother’s old apartment she closed the door and it didn’t matter that every lock in No. 1 took the same key: Claudia’s door was closed against me.

In desperation I turned to Nellydean. But she had no time for me either. She shuttled up and down between the third and fourth floors laden with cups of noxious smelling brew and bowls of aromatic soup and stew.

It wasn’t until the third day after Claudia came home from the hospital that Nellydean actually spoke to me. I was coming in with dinner; she was standing behind the counter pushing a little piece of paper over its surface like a rag.

“Thai food,” she said without looking up. Then she looked up. “That’s a switch.”

“How do you know what’s in a sealed bag? It’s not like the name of the store’s written on it or anything.”