Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Page 7

  “Ostorozhno!” The woman slapped Sveta’s little red hand away, and Josie braced for tears. But the baby just stared back, revealing nothing.

  “It’s OK,” Meg said, trying to hide her alarm. She leaned forward to let Sveta take her hair again if she wanted. But Sveta drew back, and then lost interest entirely, staring at the wall again.

  Josie stepped into her line of sight. She was wearing a dark green sweater with white trim, and the baby stared at the contrast in colors for a long time but wouldn’t look at her face.

  “Hi.” Josie nudged one finger against Sveta’s fist, waiting for her to latch on. “Privet, Sveta!”

  Sveta looked from one person to the next without emotion.

  “Look at her little eyebrows,” Meg cooed. Josie took away her finger, for the baby refused to grab it.

  They smiled and waved; they made funny noises. They shifted Sveta around from knee to knee, bouncing her, tickling, rubbing her warm, knobby head. They didn’t think of head lice. She smelled very clean. She seemed, in fact, flawless but for her indifference. They took pictures of her, and then they got to the business of the videotape. They’d been advised to video the child and show the tape to a pediatric specialist at home. There were certain behaviors, apparently, that might reveal something important. Josie and Meg didn’t know exactly what to look for. Sveta’s eyes moved in tandem when tracking objects, and though she didn’t respond in any way to her name, she seemed to notice sounds around the room. The woman in the lab coat demonstrated this, going off in a corner behind Sveta and making different noises—clapping, whistling—to illustrate Sveta’s response.

  “She has some mild hearing loss in her medical records,” Artur explained. “But you can see that she hears quite well.”

  After a while they took Sveta away, and Artur and the woman went over the baby’s medical records with them. She had tested negative for hepatitis, syphilis, and HIV. She had been suffering from malnutrition when she first arrived, but she had plumped up nicely since then, they thought. They offered no information about her birth parents.

  “If you want to,” Artur said when they were done, “you can also meet the boy, Nikolai.”

  Meg sighed. “It feels like a lot to take in.”

  Josie put down the video camera. The picture of Nikolai was just inches from her feet, in her purse. And somewhere, beyond that thick, sterile door, he was off in a crib, in his thin pajamas, waiting. The girl had seemed perfectly fine, it was true. She would be good enough for anyone. But Nikolai, Nikolai, Josie felt obliged to him.

  “Maybe you should at least see him,” she said. “While we’re here. I think you should meet him.” She tried to sound casual—just a travel companion—but her eyes fixed on Meg desperately.

  “I don’t know.” Meg looked away. Josie sat helplessly in her separate chair, nearly two feet away. “Maybe—could we meet him tomorrow?” Meg said.

  Artur talked with the large woman a moment, then nodded his head reluctantly. “It’s possible,” he said.

  And they began to shuffle together the papers, to collect their things as if the visit were over.

  “Wait, wait,” Josie said to everyone, wishing she could remember the Russian word for this. And then, though she knew they would all hear her, she whispered, “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  Artur glanced from Josie to Meg and back again.

  “We still have tomorrow,” Meg said to Josie. “This is all very overwhelming.”

  Josie widened her eyes at Meg, then covered her mouth with her fist and said, in a rapid mutter she hoped would be difficult for the others to decipher, “If you do this to me…”

  “OK,” Meg said at last. “OK. You’re right. I’d like to see the boy.”

  The woman in the lab coat seemed disappointed, as if she had already gotten used to the idea of being done with them for the day. She sighed and shuffled heavily out of the room. They sat waiting with Artur, not saying anything. After twenty minutes, through the silence they heard a baby’s cries coming closer and then receding, muffled by the voice of the woman trying hard to calm him down.

  At last the door opened. He was clinging to the woman’s shoulder, clenching up and then kicking his little bare legs in her arms. She turned around so they could see his face over her shoulder. It was flushed and distressed. He stretched his neck up as if fighting to get free, then dug his face into her shoulder to hide. There was no other way to say it, he was writhing. “This is Nikolai,” the woman said in heavily accented English.

  He was scarcely bigger than the baby girl, although they said he was eleven months old. His hair was red and wispy, growing in splotches. He wore a dingy cotton onesie with no diaper underneath, and had little pink plastic sandals strapped on to his feet.

  The woman bounced him against her shoulder awhile and Meg hesitated, then reached out and touched his back gingerly, as if she thought he could hurt her. “Hi, Nikolai,” she whispered. “I’m Meg.”

  “He’s adorable,” Josie said to Artur and the woman. “Krasivyi,” she said, trying another Russian word.

  Meg gave her a funny look. The boy was not adorable. The skin on his arms was pale and grayish, and it was difficult to tell whether he was dirty or this was just his natural state. Josie didn’t care. She stepped up and took him. All concerns about acting her part fell away. She didn’t care what any of them thought. This was her boy.

  And he went to her, clutched her shoulder and chest as if she were the vortex of a spinning nightmare. His chest heaved against her with a raspy, wet sound. When she leaned back to get a look at his face it was anguished and red, in need.

  “Tikho,” she said. “Quiet. It’s okay.” But he wasn’t crying. He was just struggling without tears. His body was hot and soft, and Josie realized that, like Sveta, he smelled unlike any other baby she had ever held. There wasn’t a trace of Johnson & Johnson’s on him.

  The woman smiled and chuckled a little. “Maybe you each found baby,” she said. “Maybe you want him?” she asked Josie.

  Josie glanced at her only briefly, then closed her eyes against Meg’s gaze. She wanted to be alone with the boy. She thought she felt his muscles relaxing into her body. She had no idea how long this took, or if she might have imagined his calm or only grown accustomed to his struggling, but by the time she remembered Meg again and turned to look, Meg wasn’t where she expected. She wasn’t standing nearby watching, taking pictures or video. She was over by the window, staring outside at the empty, muddy courtyard.

  That night at the apartment Meg played dolls with Natasha for a long time after dinner. They spoke nonsense to each other, giggling and bumping the battered Barbie dolls along the coffee table in different imagined scenarios. Josie sat at the small kitchen table with Sana, drinking tea and looking through a photo album at vacation pictures from Sana’s trip to the Black Sea. The jet lag was getting to her, and she and Sana had long ago exhausted their limited vocabularies in each other’s language, but still it seemed hours before anyone decided it was bedtime.

  At last, alone in their room, Josie said, “So, what did you think?”

  Meg yawned and turned out the light. They lay down in their separate, narrow beds, with all of Natasha’s toys well hidden around them.

  “I think we should sleep on it,” Meg said.

  “No,” Josie whined playfully, trying to pace herself and keep the mood light, because she knew how much lay ahead of them. “I mean, he’s a redhead like you, Meg. And petite. Think of the pictures.” She was stooping to Meg’s basest weakness for perfect appearances.

  “I have an idea,” Meg said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s let the doctor at home make the call. We’ll show him the video tapes and their medical records, and leave it up to him.”

  Josie was quiet.

  “I mean, on the one hand, she has the hearing deficiency—”

  “You know that’s no big deal,” Josie said.

  “Well, maybe.”

>   The boy, on the other hand, had some sort of issue with his stomach, they’d been told. This might or might not have been the cause of his discomfort today. He was older and thinner and more complicated. He had spent more time in bad hands, as they said. There could be other problems lying in wait, of course. But wasn’t that true of any child?

  “You’re just saying that because you know the doctor will choose Sveta.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Just be honest. I mean, if you want the girl, you should just say you want the girl.”

  Meg didn’t respond for a long time. Then she said, “I think the doctor will know best. Will be impartial.”

  “You’re saying I’m not.”

  “How could you be? How could either of us be?”

  Outside, a car alarm started wailing. “You seem to be pretty impartial,” Josie said. “You know what else? So is that little girl.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Meg said.

  They had the same cool insulation of indifference, Josie thought. She’d be surrounded by them. Across the room, in the strange light, Meg’s profile looked foreign, unfamiliar. Josie wanted to be the kind of person, for once, who could insist on something at any cost. But she just listened as the car alarm cycled through its various warning songs. So this was how it would go, she thought. A stranger would enter their lives, muscle in, take up residence in the rocky, dangerous, delicate space between them.

  “She’s just, she didn’t have any…emotion. It was spooky.”

  “Listen,” Meg said in a peacemaking tone. “I don’t think we should say things like this about either of these babies. Either one of them could become ours very soon.”

  Josie’s insides swooned at that comment. Finally Meg had allowed the possibility.

  For a few soaring minutes Josie let herself think about nothing at all. When her thoughts drifted back they had turned against her, grown tentative. Maybe Meg was right, she thought. Maybe it was best for a doctor to take this decision off their hands. Wasn’t it normal to wish for a healthy baby? Wasn’t it agony to watch a child suffer?

  The ideas twisted around inside her. She thought of the car being burgled outside, of its windows smashed and its dashboard gutted. She thought of the owner, the thief, the assaults of the world. She thought of the baby boy’s parents too, who could be out there as well, maybe thieves, maybe homeless, maybe buried underground in a place she would never find. “But, you know,” Josie said very quietly, working her way back to the surface, “if we don’t take him, who will?”

  Meg sighed, though not in an unkind way. She understood, Josie thought; she felt the weight of the choice. She was just trying to be practical, to protect them. Josie heard the rustle of blankets, and then Meg was beside her, pulling back the covers and climbing into her bed. She weaseled her cheek into the crook of Josie’s shoulder, and Josie had to hold tightly to Meg’s back so that she wouldn’t fall off the edge. Comfort. She was coming to comfort her.

  “The thing is,” Meg said, “this is the rest of our lives we’re talking about.”

  And Josie realized in a cold flash that all this tenderness was being applied toward Meg’s interests. She realized that this was how deals were made, by measuring risk against potential and probing the other party’s capacity for compromise. Meg was good at this; she was a specialist. Someone had to give, sooner or later. This was how families and lovers everywhere functioned. It was not just a business thing; it was a kindness people gave to the ones they loved. Josie told herself to stop thinking now, not to cry, not to ruin the illusion that the choice they were about to make would be mutual and fair. Because if she said it aloud, if she admitted, even in this small public space, that she was willing to sacrifice this desperate, unknown boy for the pleasure of the woman she knew best and nevertheless loved, she would never be able to take it back and hide it away and be swept up in the inevitable feeling she would find for this Sveta, this Sveta who would become their world.

  GOD OF FIRE

  “I’M SORRY, IS this awkward for you?” the man next to me says at last. We’re in the back row of a DC9, leaning close to hear over the engines.

  He’s been telling me how his next-door neighbor once had an aneurysm. She was mowing the lawn at the time; her death was nearly instantaneous. “I mean, is this a good distraction?” he says. “Or would you rather I leave you be?”

  “It’s fine.” I shake my head and smile. In the numb efficiency of panic I have already told him about my father and the call from the hospital chaplain that set me in motion today from Detroit to St. Louis. “I think I would sense something if he”—the flight attendant bumps past us in the aisle—“died,” I say. “Died. I think I would feel that.”

  He nods and looks into his drink. It is possible he thinks I’m devoted to my father.

  I scan the gray air outside, opening myself up for that sensation you always hear about. Does a part of me—however vestigial—feel torn away, missing? It doesn’t. My father is a fierce, invincible giant. Death has come to him three or four times already, and each time he’s sent it running.

  But when I see him, when I make my way from the airport to the hospital, down all the winding corridors to his bed in the ICU, I think surely this is it, this is his last life. His body is swollen and rosy, drugged unconscious. He looks as though they’ve filled him with too much blood.

  Tucked into the small space between the ventilator and the bed, my mother clutches his right hand with both of hers.

  “What do the doctors say?” I whisper.

  She’s afraid to move her gaze from the EKG monitor over his head. Every rise and fall of that jagged line assures her: He hasn’t died, he won’t be diminished, they’ll be back home in no time. “They don’t know, Ellie,” she says. “It isn’t good.” She is barely five feet tall, one hundred pounds. He towers over her in real life, as do I. “I just know—” She shakes her head and closes her eyes hard. He is her only monument. “I just know he’s going to end up like one of those people,” she says, “dragging an oxygen tank around with them everywhere.”

  The adult part of me wants to prepare her for eventualities, to remind her of what the hospital chaplain told me: Almost no one survives a ruptured aneurysm in the aorta. But the child part stays quiet, knowing how expert she is at bending the truth to make things go his way.

  There’s a chair in the corner but my mother won’t sit in it, won’t take a nap, so we stare at him, side by side, all through the night. Swaying, feeling my head go tingly, I count the tubes threading life in and out of him, and speculate on the world beneath his eyelids. I think, even now, he can’t fathom that he’s weakened, that he could just sputter out and die like an ordinary man. Instead he dreams bold, kaleidoscope dreams, sees visions twisted by morphine and trauma. As the night chugs along, I imagine he gives himself over to these fantasies, so that the sight of the doctors with their knives and needles fades from his consciousness and he finds himself wholly elsewhere, someplace warm and sunny and festive. It’s the tropics, I think, Mexico or Costa Rica, with the swoosh and salt of the ocean just out of reach. The temperature and humidity are too high, unbearable; the resort is low-budget, with monkeys in the treetops. From his lounge chair on a crude stone terrace, high in the hills above the ocean, he writhes and sweats and curses his travel agent. “What kind of a joint are you running here?” he shouts to no one, to everyone.

  The kindly hippie couple who appear to be in charge refuse his requests for cocktails and cigarettes and keep telling him, “Take stock. There will be a group meeting at eight.”

  This has the air of a therapy camp or cult, some sort of rehab facility maybe, and he recoils. “I’m parched, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Now Mr. Kernes,” the hippie woman scolds, stooping to push at his pillow before leaving him. She is dark haired and curly and widest at the middle. She wears an orange flowered muumuu that gets caught in the crack of her ass as she walks away from him.

  �
��How about a newspaper at least?” my father yells at her backside. The woman shakes her finger in the air without looking back, and then descends the steps of the terrace and disappears. Down on the beach, in the distance, a little girl squats over a pile of sand, working. She has dug a moat near the waterline that is three feet deep and stretches to the horizons. My father shifts in his chaise lounge and wishes someone would wipe his brow. He has been told to watch the ocean for signs, but his insides are rigid for lack of nicotine and he cannot move his arms.

  “Hold his hand a minute,” my mother says to me, “so I can blow my nose.”

  I step closer and put my gaze hard on him. I have never held my father’s hand. The fingers are swollen big as sausages and hot to the touch. His arms, tangled with IV tubes and monitors, are strapped down on the bed. All around him the machines vibrate and hum, suck and push, bringing his chest up and down. I think of placing candles on his palms, of setting a little bell on every finger.

  By morning I’ve made friends in the waiting room. It’s a big open space, with room for twenty or thirty devastated people. The chairs—aqua-blue vinyl recliners—are clustered in small groups and rows to give the illusion of privacy, but the room is crowded today so I am forced to sit with strangers. To my left is Neil Hartman, a grandfatherly sort, who is on his forty-first day here watching his wife, Nancy, die of cancer. He is tall and gray haired, slender with worry; he walks as if he’s just finished a marathon. They’ve been in and out of this hospital for several years now, and Neil knows which buttons to push on the phone to get an outside line. On the other side of me is John LaPointte, whose wife, Lorrie, is paralyzed from the waist down after enduring the same kind of accident, as he puts it, “Princess Di died from.” I’m too afraid to ask what he means by this. He’s goateed and portly, thirty or so, and tells me he teaches gym class to high schoolers for a living, mainly so that he can keep on coaching football. We sit in a row, with our chairs kicked back, facing a television hung from the ceiling.