Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

I’m not here. Shut the eyes and disappear. I’m not here.

“That’s not why my parents split up.” Peter answered with his eyes shut tight against the bad dream. His chest hurt. It was tight, a drawstring pulled across his heart, strangling him. He cried.

“Hey!” The raspy voice. “Hey, come on. It’s all right.” Go away, monster. Mommy and Daddy will come back. Go away, monster, and my mommy and daddy will come back.

THE DOCTOR told Diane the operation had been a success. Lily’s heart had become somewhat enlarged, compensating for the valve leak, but not dangerously so. The description made Diane think of car engines. She was told she could see Lily briefly in the intensive care unit, but that she should be prepared for Lily to look bad.

“She’ll be on a respirator and she’ll be heavily medicated.” Diane waited more than an hour before a nurse appeared to tell her she could go in briefly.

The moment Diane entered the swinging doors to ICU she couldn’t get enough air to breathe through her terror. There were ghastly sights in every bed.

The nurse pointed her to Lily. The first look at her mother wobbled the floor; Diane reached for something to hold on to, but there was nothing. She was adrift in the middle of the white room of wreckage.

Lights flashed on monitors; something beeped repeatedly. Diane forced her eyes to focus on Lily.

Her skin was alabaster. No red, no pink, no blue, no green, no depth, no looseness, no softness. The skin was hard white, drained of any shade or hue. A marble statue — sculptured death. Her mouth was raped — twisted open, jammed full by a plastic device. She looked murdered and destroyed, mocked, humiliated, and desecrated. Tubes ran from machines into her helpless arms or disappeared to horrors underneath the sheets. Bags hung from the sides, for urine, for the bowels, for God knows what else — Diane looked away from those sights. Her eyes were locked, anyway, on her mother’s dead skin and butchered mouth. The machine breathed and then forced Lily to.

“Wake up! Your daughter’s here!” the nurse shouted.

It was unbelievable. Diane summoned herself to stop the nurse. But there was no answer.

The nurse shook the dead white body. “Your daughter’s here. And you’re sleeping. Say hello.”

Absurd. As if you could communicate with the dead.

But the eyes did open. Slow, not seeing.

“Say hello,” the nurse ordered.

And Diane obeyed, like a frightened child. “Hi, Ma,” said her voice. It sounded like her, like Diane.

Lily’s eyes rolled; her stuffed ruined mouth couldn’t answer, of course. The death mask, the white plaster face tried to find life. Lily’s hand moved, like a puppet’s arm; the string of her fluids bounced in the air. Lily’s fingers went up and then, in a movement of terrible unknowable pain, gestured Diane away. Go, they seemed to say. Leave me. I am not here anymore. Leave me so I won’t have to exist.

Tell her you love her. Tell her she was good.

“Talk to her,” the nurse ordered. “She can hear you.”

“I’m here, Ma,” Diane said.

Go away, the fingers said. Leave me so I won’t exist.

Diane told her brain to stay clear. Fear pressed on her mind.

Go away, the fingers begged.

Diane took hold of them. Cold sticks. Lily’s eyes were shut again. She’s dead.

I have to leave. In the brilliant light of the room, Diane turned away, blind with terror. She had to find the wall with her hand, and feel her way out of the horror.

NINA DIDN’T have the courage to call her father. She called Joan instead.

“Hello, dear,” her mother answered with a plaintive lilt of surprise.

“Hello. How are you?”

“I’m fine. How’s Luke?”

“He’s great.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Uh, is Father there?”

“No, he’s at the office. Do you need to speak to him?”

“Do you know anything about this, uh, uh—” I’m a child. I can’t speak.

“About what?”

“Well, Eric told me — you know he works with this horrible man?”

“I thought he works for someone.”

“Yeah, I guess. They have some sort of arrangement.”

“You said he’s horrible?”

“Well, he’s always criticizing Eric. Apparently he called Father.”

“That’s business, Nina. I don’t discuss your father’s business. Why don’t you call him?”

“Well, I, uh—”

“Yes?” her mother said, hissing the last letter, but moaning its interior.

The phone felt hard. Nina gripped its narrow belly. The tips of her fingers met each other. She smelled the plastic of the receiver, the grease of other mouths. A few months and it would be summer. If Eric again insisted on staying in the city the whole season, she would take her vacation with Luke. “I can’t ask.” Nina sighed the rest of her plea.

“Well.” Joan said this and then no more.

“Could you—”

“We haven’t seen Luke in a while,” Joan said quickly. “I’ll speak to Tom. Maybe we can — no, not this weekend. Perhaps, yes, I’ll discuss it with him. We’ll try for next weekend. I have to go—”

Nina didn’t have a chance to say good-bye, only a blurted thank-you. She hung up and returned to her desk: the ghostly dress half drawn, a skirt about to billow.

What did I thank her for? Nina thought. Should I tell Eric? No. Father might refuse to visit.

She despaired of being able to concentrate. She had to have these sketches done by Monday.

If I call Father, it’ll be settled. One way or the other, it will clear my mind.

She got up again. The walk to the phone was self-conscious. She heard her shoes on the oak floor, saw her hands wave up and down with her stride.

She took hold of the hard receiver, leaned her head against the harder body of its mother, shut her eyes, and sighed. Breathed in. Then out. She had promised herself never to ask Tom for things. Asking darkened Tom’s lean, bright face; the pale blue eyes looked away, his thin lips vanished, and “Hmmmm” was hummed out.

Eric doesn’t want me to do this. He would be furious. She imagined what Eric’s rage might be: “You humiliated me! I don’t want your father’s money as a favor.”

No. This was Eric’s problem. She hung up.

ERIC WATCHED Barry listen to Luke. Barry was nervous in his attentiveness, his head tilted down, his body taut, every molecule magnetized toward Luke, to hear what his precious grandchild was saying.

“You know, Grandpa, I think it’s not such a good idea to eat out a lot.”

They were walking to Fort Tryon Park, the playground of Eric’s childhood, down the steep block from Broadway. Luke’s voice, at less than three feet tall, was more than three feet away from Barry’s ear. “Un-huh,” Barry said, but fast, so he wouldn’t miss Luke’s next syllable.

“For example,” Luke said, hand out, palm up, to illustrate the common sense of his point, “I like hot dogs. They’re not good for you, if you have them in a deli. But Grandma put them in a soup! And that’s good for you, right? I mean, soup is good for you.”

Eric laughed. He was sad. But he laughed anyway. His pleasure in Luke grew every day. He had never thought that would be possible. Eric had loved infant-Luke so much, kissed the sweet skin, gazed into the huge eyes, held the warm tiny body against his chest, next to his heart, and thought: I can never love anything more than this. But the growing and grown Luke, smarter and surer every day, his figure lengthening, the rounded fat of his cheeks evaporating, Nina’s strong chin emerging, the funny, clever, gentle boy-Luke cleaned a dusty corner of Eric’s heart and danced there in a brilliant and solitary light.

They took Luke to the old swings and slide. Now the park was taken over by Puerto Ricans and blacks. Eric didn’t like them. He listened to the way they addressed their children: irritation, suspicion, and command in every word. Just like the parents of his childhood. Those Jews and Italians and Greeks and Poles were no different from these people. Immigrants. People without money. People who had to do the thousands of errands the rich never do. It wasn’t the benefit of beauty that wealth brought; it was the absence of ugliness. No carrying groceries in the snow, no roaches in the plates, no rides on subways, no vacations on smelly rush-hour beaches, no shared rooms, no classrooms of forty, no denials of gifts to commercial-bombed children, no incompetent doctors, no disrespectful city bureaucrats, no washing dishes, no making beds, no cleaning toilets, no ironing, no noes. Anything ugly, anything repetitive and dirty, could be done by someone else, some anonymous black face.