David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

Moonlight paints the room. I stare out at the rain. The water that streaks the windows is mirrored by mercurial little rivers running over the floor. She is out there. Somewhere, like Lear, Jane is out in the storm. What would she do to find me at this window, her daughter in this bed? Claudia stirs. She cries for her mother, but already Jane is not who she means. If Jane came back now, Claudia would not know her. What are you doing up? Evelyn asks, as if she, too, has been up for some time. She tucks the blanket round the girl and struggles to prop herself with a pillow. She isn’t yet used to her new size and puts a hand on her round belly as she tells me to come back to bed. She doesn’t ask why I’m out of bed in the first place. I climb under the covers and look across at her. We are carved in marble in the moonlight, none of us moving for a long time. Eventually, she reaches out to put her hand on my chest. She’s not coming back, she says. The weight of her hand is impossible, but still I nod. There is a saying about the love of a good woman. And Evelyn is good, but she needs something I carry inside of me to die. There is not enough room for it here. She sees it circling above us like a hawk, casting shadows, never letting us out of its sight.

She let the call go to voice mail. Benji. Flying his war flag against their father. Or surrendering his pride to ask for more funds. Not this morning, Claudia thought. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, but the day seemed half over, leached away by one distraction after another. She woke at six, determined to review her designs for the downtown outpost of Selkirk and Sons Funeral Home, but already she’d lost two hours to a scrimmage with her contractor who tried unloading on her a shipment of substandard glass. Then there was Oliver. Oliver, retreating to the gym for a cold shower since she turned her back on his morning advances. “It’s been five weeks,” he whined. “I’ll settle for a hand job.” But what made a man less fuckable than settling? And it couldn’t have been five weeks. Could it?

The Selkirks had awarded her the commission because she had no intention of transplanting their safe (read: stale) Upper East Side mortuary to a hipper zip code and instead insisted on a sweeping glass atrium atop a midrise of multimillion-dollar lofts. Strange placement perhaps, but the obscenely rich died south of Fourteenth Street, too, and when they did, Claudia convinced her clients, they’d want a less stuffy stage for their final departure. They would appreciate her soaring chapel of torqued Serra-esque steel, set under a pristine dome of Manhattan sky. Metal and light. Body and air. Permanence and something as ephemeral as a passing cloud. Her drawings spread beneath her on her dining/drafting table; she stood like a sea captain studying her maps, trying to decide the best course, when the phone rang again. Benji’s third call in thirty minutes.

She could turn it off, but why should she have to? Why couldn’t the world simply leave her alone?

“What?” she said, jamming the phone to her ear and tossing off her thick, geometric glasses in defeat.

“Why haven’t you picked up?”

“I don’t know, Benji. I guess I have nothing to do today but annoy you.”

“It’s working,” he snarked before shifting gears. “We have to talk.”

“Now’s really not—”

“There is no good time for this.”

She felt a real pulse of unease under the drama of his pronouncement. And Benji loved a dramatic pronouncement.

“What’s the matter? Is it Mom?”

“They’re fine. They’re them. This isn’t about them.”

“Then what’s it about? I’m working.”

“I’m just going to come out and say it.”

“Good.”

“I mean, it’s nothing I can prepare you for.”

“Benji!”

“It’s him,” he said.

“Who?”

“Him, Claude. It’s him!” He might have been using his voice to punch a hole in the wall, the jabbing fury of that one word.

She stepped backward, hoping a chair was there to meet her, and sat down hard. A silence wove itself between them, hundreds of miles away from each other yet caught in the same stifling cocoon.

“You there?” Benji asked.

She took her hand away from her mouth and asked, “How do you know?”

“Why would he pretend? We’re not Rockefellers. Plus, you’ll see. There’s no mistaking this kid. He looks just like you. Us.”

“Oh, Benji.” She felt as if she’d been slapped awake to find herself in the middle of a daredevil stunt, a sudden circle of fire surrounding her, her terror, her outright inability to jump through it. “What does he want? What am I supposed to do? I can’t.”

“Claudia. Breathe. You have to breathe. Breathe and shut up. Let me talk.”

She sank back in her chair and tried to hear what her brother had to say. It wasn’t much. The kid, as Benji called him, had a name. Max Davis. Max Davis who was a musician, who grew up in Rochester, who’d started looking for her when he was seventeen but who realized his desire was only half the equation, who acknowledged maybe Claudia would rather eat glass than meet him, which would suck but which he realized was a possibility before he began his search.

“I don’t want to be somebody’s mother.”

“He has a mother.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“How about you start with ‘hello’? One step at a time.”

“Where are you? Is he there with you?”

“He’s been sitting outside the house for three days, building up the courage.”

“But where is he?”

“On the porch, with Cat.”

“He’s with you now ? Has Mom seen him?”

“She’s inside. Probably painting.”

“You have to get him out of there before she sees.”

“Like put him in the trunk and drive away?”

“Do you think this is funny? I’m serious. I can’t handle her hysterics.”

“ Her hysterics?”

“I swear, Benji. I’ll kill you if you make this worse.”

She remembered waking in the hospital, twenty-two years old, the bright lights and crisp sheets and a pack of ice slowly melting between her legs, Benji asleep in a chair in the corner while the woman in the bed next to her, breasts mapped with arresting blue veins, tried stuffing her nipple into her wailing baby’s mouth. The relief Claudia felt at that moment. The freedom. She had a train of visitors — nurses, her caseworker from the adoption agency, even a priest who didn’t mind shepherding non-Catholic sheep — and registered in their piteous looks what each of them expected her to feel. They believed they would find her crushed, a girl so young, bathed in regretful, Madonna-like tears, perhaps even ready to pull out of the deal and demand that the baby — her baby — be delivered into her arms. But that wasn’t what Claudia felt. If any regret coursed through her blood, it was regret that she didn’t feel these things that she was supposedly supposed to feel.

“I want you to talk to him.” She heard Benji on the move, a slight susurration of wind, other voices reaching her ears.

“Absolutely not,” Claudia whispered fiercely.

This, Benji ignored. The voices grew louder, and before she could say more, a strange, unexpectedly deep “hello?” stopped her racing mind in its tracks.

He sounded like he’d stuck his head in a darkened room, uncertain if anyone would answer, while she felt stuck in a child’s game, tagged It before she even had the chance to hide. She froze.

“Hello?” the voice repeated.

“Hello,” Claudia echoed.

“Hi. Wow. Claudia?” Silence. “This is so weird.”

“It is.” More silence. “Weird.”