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  One minute, Lee was dozing, waiting for lunch, and in the next Ray’s face surrounded by crisp forest-fire hair was above her. In a red and gold oversized man’s shirt that almost reached the edge of the black mini skirt underneath, she materialized, it seemed, from the floor. She kissed and hugged Lee, hard.

  “Oh big sister, he’s beautiful! He’s everything! You’re the luckiest woman alive.”

  “You’re right! It’s true! God, Ray, they put him in the colored nursery at first. Can you believe it?” Lee knew she was complaining, whining, at last with someone who mattered. “I thought Claire was going to have a heart attack.”

  “Did they take care of him?”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Then who gives a good goddamn!” Satisfaction lifted Ray’s drawn-on red eyebrows. “Can I smoke, kiddo?” Without waiting for an answer, she lit a narrow brown cigarillo and walked the width of the room on mannequin-thin, charcoal-hosed legs, the smoke following her. All she needed was to strike an awkward pose to be fit for a magazine cover. “Angel’s outside, kiddo. He flew with me down from Atlanta. Can he come in?”

  “Of course,” Lee said, reaching for a bed jacket. Now, she would see this Angel she only knew from the telephone and her sister’s descriptions.

  The man who entered the room was dark and sleek, a taller, mustached twin to Ray: like her in his sallow thinness, in his sharp face, in his clothes—two ferrets wearing the same red and gold shirts. With an old-world bow, he kissed Lee’s hand. His palm under hers seemed strung with piano wires that pinched her fingers. “Mamacita, congratulations. Cada dia, you will be blessed.”

  “He says, ‘Little mother, each day you will be blessed,’” Ray translated, a stiff, dull note sounding in her voice.

  “I’m so glad you’re both here,” Lee said, feeling a kinship to their dark faces, their colorful clothes. It made up for all the hospital’s insults, for the silence from her parents in Atlanta. She felt as if they were her harlequin courtiers and she the mother-queen in the billowing of bedding and pink lace over her still-swollen body. We’re rich, Lee thought in a calm fullness, dark and rich as the milk chocolates that she passed to Ray; nothing like the cracker whiteness of Charles and Claire. Ray didn’t care if they’d put the baby in the colored nursery, why should she?

  “Your sister tells me always: ‘Lee, Lee,’ all the time,” Angel said, a touch of Spanish sibilant lapping his words. “And at last I meet you, the holy sister, the mother saint.”

  “Yes, here I am,” Lee said, feeling quite unexpectedly, hopelessly happy. Up until now, she had judged Angel by Ray’s stories, but here was a stronger, older man than Lee had imagined. He lowered himself onto the chair, his legs seeming to bend on oiled hinges, his narrow hips sliding across the slick vinyl, first one shoulder and then the other one leaning back. He was very attractive. Lee had to give him that: the appeal of masculinity, the appeal of a cocked gun.

  “Your baby is muy bonito, muy macho. He could be Latino.”

  “Yes, he is very dark.”

  It wasn’t quite the right thing to say. Lee glanced to warn Ray not to bring up the colored nursery fiasco, but her sister was standing at the long window, gazing out at the banks of gray clouds. She hummed and then broke it off, saying without looking back, “Well, I’ll never be blessed, not today or any other day for that matter. I’ll never have children.” She threw out her arms and turned to Angel. “I’ll never get married. I know that now.”

  Angel came up out of the chair, “You torment me, cara! You deny me! Porque?”

  “Why? Can you turn the world around, make it go backwards, get it back?” Ray hissed. Angel held out his hands, almost begging, something incurably sad in his face.

  Lee watched, shut out from their exchange. They were gone from her, caught in their own space, a vortex pulling them around and around, but not together.

  “Hoy, today you want a baby.” He pointed. “Why today?” He jabbed his finger with the words. “You were the one, cara mia. You did that on your own.”

  “You could have stopped me!” It seemed that Ray was pleading, too.

  “We can have others, nina.”

  “I want the first one, that one, back.” Ray thrust her face close to Angel’s. “Can you do that? Are you God?” Then she gave a wave of her hand as if to say, “That explains it,” and saluting good-bye, she ran from the room, her tall heels tapping a diminishing sound on the tile floor as she fled down the hall.

  Angel turned away from Lee, his shoulders still, betraying nothing. When he turned back, he said, “Loca,” softly and shrugged, as if just realizing Lee was still there. “Your sister is a little bit crazy sometimes. No one can stop her, but then I get the blame. It was un error, I admit, siempre un error. I’ll go after her.” The sound of his hard leather heels tapping after Ray’s were almost the same.

  Lee could not comprehend half of what Angel said—English words mixed with Spanish—but she understood. Some time, in the year that she’d imagined Ray living tempestuously but always light-heartedly, there had been this grief, this loss. She could not bring herself to think of its correct name. But she remembered in the Mexican restaurant, when she was first pregnant, Ray’s suggestion of an “easy way out.”

  Whatever it was, was her sister’s decision, her sister’s sorrow—apparently forever.

  When it was time for the babies to be brought down, Lee wiped her face with a damp washcloth, ran her fingers through her hair, smoothed her breasts and nipples with the same cloth. On this, the third day, they ached, heavy with milk. In spite of not wanting to evaluate or judge, waiting for her baby, Lee knew what Ray had lost: not just a small life but all the possibilities. The three wishes that come with a birth, Aunt Natty would have said. It was an Arabic tradition: with every new child, the mother was granted three wishes. The first two were spent on the newborn—good health and a long life—but the third wish belonged to the mother. Before, when Cassie and Lill were born, Lee had quickly said, “world peace” as her third wish, hoping it would mean peace between her and Charles, peace between her and the Bettlemains. But now she said, “I wish for peace, especially between Ray and Angel.”

  Ray came back without Angel, and it was as though nothing had happened—that is, if you could ignore the thick silence that pressed above Ray’s words and then settled down after she stopped talking. It helped when the nurse finally brought the baby in and, hurried by the unnerving “wahs” of his crying, cranked the bed up higher, and undid Lee’s clothes to place the small, screaming lips against her dark nipple.

  Ray hitched herself up on the bed, her arm over Lee’s shoulders. “Who does he look like, kiddo? Not Cassie and not Lill.”

  “He’s Charles’s son, Ray.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Ray frowned. “Remember Aunt Edna’s boy? Blond as a Norwegian and her and Uncle Solomon dark as two Turks. How everybody had something to say. And Edna crying to Mama: how at least Mama had red hair for me to take after.”

  Lee couldn’t stop. “He’s Charles’s son, but he could have been someone else’s.” Something for something. She couldn’t let Ray think she was pure, a saint.

  Ray laughed, beginning on a high note that sank to the low pitch kept for tears. She pressed her face close to Lee’s and then settled, resting her head just above the baby’s, stroking his black hair, taking in his desperate sucking.

  They stayed like this for many minutes, and then Ray took a large turquoise pendant on a long silver chain from around her neck and put it over Lee’s head. The azure-blue stone was covered by a hundred thin gray lines. “It’s called cobweb turquoise,” Ray said. “The best there is; the most expensive. Angel gave it to me when we were still in love.”

  “I can’t keep it.” Lee tried to take the chain off, but Ray held her hand. “You have to. It’s all the good that’s left.” Then she put her head back on Lee’s shoulder and whispered to the baby. “What are you going to do? What are we going to do?”

&nbs
p; “Right now,” Lee said, “we’re going to feed this little mammal, whose name is Abraham Charles Bettlemain.”

  Later that afternoon, after Ray left, and before Charles came to check her out—the cost of another whole day because it was after three o’clock—a clerk came with the birth certificate papers.

  “Mr. Bettlemain will sign when he comes, and I’ll give them to the nurse,” Lee said, pulling the sleeping baby’s bent arms through a blue batiste gown, smaller than a doll’s.

  “Let me make sure this information is correct, so I won’t have to re-type it.” The clerk repeated Lee’s answers: “Male infant; 7 pounds, 11 ounces; Abraham Charles Bettlemain; born June 28, 1962, at 6:00 p.m.”

  “Absolutely correct,” Lee said, and wrapped the baby tight in a blue blanket, a bunting sausage. Then, “Wait,” she called after the clerk. “Wasn’t there another baby born that same evening? The same night? There was a woman in the labor room near me. Didn’t she have a baby?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am, I work downstairs,” the white-jacketed young man answered, holding the door open, impatient to leave. “As far as birth certificates go, yours was the only one born that evening.”

  Lee didn’t want to ask if they made a different category for colored babies, as “I don’t know” was the only answer she’d been given to her questions about another baby for the past three days.

  The clerk left and Lee quickly signed her name. Then on the line above FATHER, she slowly penned Charles Bettlemain, dashing off a straight line after the “n” as he always did.

  Afterwards, she lay beside the baby and asked its closed, baked-apple face, “Why am I always pushed into deceit?”

  Her lips moved across the grain of fine hairs over his cheeks, and she licked the tiny black eyebrows, fine as spider’s legs. The wrinkled forehead creased into lines under his mother’s tongue, but he slept on.

  Chapter 14

  Miracles, if fact, do not break the laws of nature.

  C.S. Lewis, Miracles

  That afternoon Charles, in his dirty work overalls, didn’t ask any questions when Lee dropped the envelope off at the nurses’ station even though she offered a brief explanation, “It’s his birth certificate.”

  Then in the Bettlemains’ truck, driven from the job, the couple with the new baby rattled along the eight blocks of melting asphalt streets, past empty baking yards, back to their house on Sterling Street. The noise from the loose tools in the back of the truck and the hot air coming through the open windows would have drowned out any conversation, not that either of them tried to talk.

  It had been different when they brought their first baby Cassie home. Charles had showered and changed clothes before coming to the hospital, driven the Plymouth, and stayed off work for the rest of the day. They’d lain across the bed with their new baby daughter between them, and Lee had shown Charles the cowlick of white hair on his daughter’s forehead, the dried-blood navel, and turning her, the wrinkled V of her tiny buttocks, with the same cowlick above it.

  Bringing Lill home had been like today: an invisible, thick wall between them; everything muffled, separate.

  I know the blame can’t be all his fault, Lee thought, as if addressing a jury. I must have done things wrong in those early days. I was too forward, made dumb jokes, not sorry enough about the pregnancies. She stopped. It was an old list. It sounded like Claire’s equivocations. And had her mother-in-law’s compromises, her pretenses that described her marriage as perfect made Lon her husband any better? No, Lee answered herself. What I could or should have done is cemented in the past. I can’t change it. Like Ray’s decision to have an abortion: done and done for all time.

  She adjusted the blanket down further over the baby’s face, to shield him from the dry stroke of the wind. At least today, she thought, I won’t be asking for Charles’s interest, like I did when Lill was born.

  And what about David Palmer? came a voice that did not seem to belong to Lee.

  Claire, Willie Mae, Cassie, and Lill, all smiling, even the dog, were waiting in the carport. The girls hopped up and down, trying to see their new brother, their eagerness making them spring like rabbits. Furlough jumped, too, his wide Labrador ears flaring. Claire spread her arms wide to push the children and the dog back. “Be careful, now,” she warned, while Willie Mae took the small suitcase from Charles’s hand.

  As they all started into the house, he called, “See ya,” and got back into the truck. Lee didn’t point out that it was already after four o’clock, hardly any time left to work. But she knew that job time didn’t include the hour or so that the Bettlemain men always spent in a juke joint on their way home. “We play pool, have a few beers, and wind down,” was Charles’s explanation for his late hours. And really it was only a half-formed thought of why he didn’t stay as she and the others crowded into the living room. She held the baby high to keep him out of Cassie and Lill’s grasp.

  “Here, you take him, Claire. You know how to handle boys,” Lee said, adding silently, And you’re the only grandmother he’ll ever know.

  Claire, surprised and pleased, took the bundled infant, and Lee left them to walk to the rear of the house like a visitor seeing it for the first time. She drew the small house around her in one long glance, finding that she needed that comfort: the lemony smell of furniture polish and floor wax, the neatly-made beds, the shining porcelain of the bathroom—Willie Mae’s work.

  July came with its sun-dogged days and steaming rains with visitors to see the new baby. It was two weeks before Lee could drive, and six before her final appointment with Dr. Yuller. Claire brought Willie Mae every morning to clean and cook for both families, taking the colored woman back at five with trays of food for Lon and Brother in the trunk of her car. Lee nursed and bathed the tiny boy, and called him “Baby Charlie” just as Claire had predicted.

  It’s little enough, Lee thought, an easy exchange, a not-hurting payback for the way her mother-in-law had reacted to the girls’ names when they were first born. She’d told Ray and her father on the phone that the baby’s name was Abraham. “He’s still a Bettlemain,” was Abram’s answer, so she guessed it didn’t matter to anyone but her. Yet the truth pleased her. For Lee, it lay like a jewel in a pocket, like the cobwebbed turquoise between her breasts, the Semitic name that belonged to her and her son alone.

  Lee stood, hair still damp from the shower, in the white crepe de chine nightgown and robe she’d made for the hospital and watched her daughters digging in the backyard by the pear tree. Its branches hung down in arches, bowed by the heavy yellow-green fruit. Claire in the kitchen mixed chocolate and coconut for a new recipe called “Hello Dollys,” and Willie Mae fried pear fritters, dipping the slices into batter, filming the air with grease and sugar. The two women prepared for the afternoon guests as though holding court for a crown prince.

  It was a procession: Lee’s sewing customers, Claire’s bridge club ladies, women from St. Anthony’s, and from the neighborhood. They came in low-heeled sandals and flowered sun dresses, fanning and blotting themselves in the heat, carrying presents wrapped in blue paper and sweets covered in clear plastic. Lee had not wanted another baby shower. The two parties with their silly games for the births of Cassie and Lill had given her a backlog of receiving blankets, undershirts, and long cotton-knit gowns. But the birth of a son was more important, special, and changed the rules. Even her father-in-law Lon’s ancient, forgotten mother in Dahlonega, Georgia, sent a check for ten dollars.

  The afternoons were spent over iced tea and thick, heavy pastries; the talk, as they passed the baby back and forth, was battlefield talk of labors and deliveries. Each woman had a story. Irma Jean from the bridge club had had a Rhesus factor and five stillbirths after her first child. Amy from the neighborhood had been in labor four days for a breach birth. A woman from Home & School—Lee couldn’t remember her name—told a grim tale of hemorrhage and packing that dwindled off with no real conclusion. Again and again, to baffled looks, Lee repeated h
er nurse and needle story with embellishments: How she wouldn’t take the pain shot. She always asked at the end if anyone knew of a woman giving birth on the same day that Baby Charlie was born, but no one did.

  “They don’t let you know if something bad happens,” Peggy Higgins insisted. “When I had my third miscarriage, they told my mother I wasn’t even in the hospital.”

  Toward the end of the visits, the talk would drift off to clothes and fashion. Lee’s stark white robe folded around her like a paper accordion and brought many compliments. “Lee, you’re so lucky you can sew.” Ray’s fat cobweb turquoise was next to be admired. It lay like a robin’s egg between Lee’s breasts. “Oh, I could steal that from you; it’s so beautiful,” they said, and a few even knew that it was a valuable piece of jewelry. Lee was happy to say that Ray, her sister, had given it to her. And Lee could always count on someone asking about her wedding rings: Where were they? During the pregnancy, she’d said her hands were swollen. But now, Claire answered, off-handedly, as though she were proud, “Lee’s like a man: never wears her rings.”

  “But where would we be if our men weren’t out working, making money?” Lee asked to change the subject, asked of no one in particular.

  “Lee’s always so funny,” Claire laughed, in genuine appreciation through the thin titters of the other women.

  Lee tried that night to strike up a conversation with Charles. “I had hardly any friends when I was in school, and now I can see why. I don’t think like other women.”

  She started to tell Charles that she said inappropriate things, but, at a motion of his hand, she stopped. His favorite show, Man Hunt, was on. Her husband had no need for any of Lee’s understanding of herself.