Rafael Yglesias - Fearless

And yet all of her hadn’t returned home to Mulberry Street. On the plane was where she really lived. Over and over she considered the choices she had made. She wondered if moving from the window seat to the aisle had been an error. She decided no. The ceiling had completely collapsed on the outer seats. The man missing an arm had been on the aisle, the window seat beside him had disappeared and that was also how his arm had been severed. And she knew that the man seated directly in front of her by the window had been killed. She had overheard him introduce himself to his neighbor and his name was listed among the dead in the newspaper.

No. If she had stayed put she would be dead. That was how close she had come, a last-minute decision made for a reason she could no longer remember. She could see herself squashed and sliced by the metal. She had to squeeze her eyes shut and curse in a whisper to shoo away the picture from her brain. Even in this misery she didn’t want to have died.

Carla read in the papers that Lisa the flight attendant had lived. All of the crew survived. Sure they did — they had safe seats and belts that worked. The reporters wrote that the flight was a miracle, the landing a great accomplishment, that by rights everyone should be dead. They were full of stories of bravery, especially one man whom the papers called the Good Samaritan. He had saved — an especially bitter fact for Carla — a couple of kids from burning alive in the wreck. From all the coverage, Carla got the impression she was supposed to think the crash was almost a blessing in disguise.

The worst thing was Bubble’s coffin. It was heartbreakingly small: a little mahogany box with tiny handles, its wood and brass highly polished, the length so short there could be only two pallbearers. She had come to the funeral with her grief exhausted, determined to be dignified. But the sight smashed her.

The best thing about the funeral was that no one was bothered by her weeping. Her grief was no longer solitary; she had plenty of sorrowful company. For most of the service her mother’s red face and bloodshot eyes blocked her sight of the priest and the small coffin. Her aunts wailed behind her. At the graveside her two closest friends linked arms as Bubble’s miniature casket descended into the earth. Their heads bowed toward each other until they touched and made an umbrella. Carla turned her back on this last sight of her son and moved under their covering, not to be shielded, but to be comforted.

Her relatives and friends visited every day after the funeral. Her mother sent her new husband home to California and slept on the living room couch. They made meals, they pushed Carla in a wheelchair when she got tired of her crutches. Her mother even held a tissue under her nose and said, “Blow,” as if she were a baby.

Each night the apartment was full of her relatives’ talk and it came around again and again to the lawsuit. Manny was the first to bring it up with Carla. “Tony’s got us the name of a lawyer to call,” Manny said. Tony was his illegitimate father. “He’s a big shot. His sister lives in one of Tony’s buildings. She’s an artist or something.”

“No,” Carla said.

“I’m calling him,” Manny said.

About a week after the funeral she overheard Manny tell her mother and aunts and uncles at the kitchen table that two other lawyers had phoned asking for the job. She lay still in her dark bedroom straining to hear them as they ate lasagna and argued in mumbles. She could distinguish her mother’s voice. Her mother was upset and she kept contradicting Manny about something. At one point Carla thought she could make out what her mother said: Don’t talk about money for a dead baby.

That’s right, Carla cheered her mother on. She worried Bubble’s soul might be punished for their greed. She had never seriously considered the consequences of people having souls until then, but it seemed to her there was no point in taking chances. Bubble was being judged now, if anything the Church said was right, and she thought: There’s nothing to judge about him except us. God will judge him by the kind of people we are.

At the funeral Father Conti had said babies were innocent and have a special place in Heaven, that Leonardo was smiling in Jesus’ lap. Carla remembered the boys in junior high used to say Father Conti liked to give them long hugs and asked to hear details of masturbation in confession. What he had to say didn’t seem to her hypocritical; it sounded foolish and that hurt her feelings.

The voices in the kitchen became frantic and angry. Her mother’s got loud enough for Carla to hear her say, “Listen to me, Manny. You’re going to be sorry!”

That convinced Carla to attempt to use her crutches and get closer, to be able to hear ail of what they were saying. Her bedroom was at the end of a narrow hall opposite Bubble’s room. His door was kept closed. The sight of its glass knob (scavenged from the luxury building where Manny worked) was a rebuke. When he was alive, Bubble’s door was never shut and the knob was out of sight. Now it was the first thing she saw if she left her room. She was stopped by its facets; like a hypnotist’s watch they held her vision and mesmerized her. She forgot the crutches and the airless hallway smelling of tomato sauce. She felt Bubble in her arms, she smelled his hair, she heard him make demands.

“No!” she whispered intensely to scare the memories away.

There was shushing and quiet from the kitchen.

“Carla?” Manny called.

She didn’t answer. Her left crutch began to skid on the bare floor of the hall. She wedged it against the wall and waited silently.

“Nothing,” Manny said. “She’s sleeping.” He resumed their discussion about the lawsuit in a whisper.

Carla fit herself into the narrow hall, so narrow there was hardly room for the spread of her crutches. She wedged the rubber tips into the crevices and hung like a puppet, limp from her shoulders down. She didn’t like to use the crutches because she couldn’t get the hang of swinging her weight forward without the handles digging into her armpits. Her body was a misery, aching the full length, from broken leg to bruised middle to sore underarms. She loathed her body anyway: bony and weak, her skin dusky and loose. She wished she could shed herself. That’s why she cherished sleep: her energy and freedom of movement returned and so did her baby boy. From her position in the hall some words became audible, but not enough. She moved closer, the tips squeaking against the wall and floor.

“He told me we can sue the government here in New York,” Manny said.

Aunt Mary, whose voice was always loud and complaining, said, “The government! What did the government do, for Chrissake?”

“They don’t make the airlines use infant seats,” Manny said.

Carla wished her mother would interrupt again and stop them. Tell them: You don’t take money for a dead baby. If not, then she would have to, even though the prospect of facing her aunts and uncles made her sick with exhaustion. She couldn’t eavesdrop indefinitely, though. The crutches were wearing through her skin. Her shoulders felt as if they were about to pop out of their sockets.

“What difference would an infant seat have made?” Uncle Bob asked. He had a degree in engineering, the only college graduate of the older generation, and he enjoyed thoughtful discussions. His question was posed with a mild curious tone, the inquiring student.

“Who knows!” Aunt Mary complained as if the issue were mystical and irritating.

“Carla was holding him on her lap,” Manny said. “You can’t hold on to a baby — that’s why you have to have a car seat when you drive.”

“We used to put Pete on the floor in a little bed,” Mary said. “Remember? Nothing ever happened.”