“They’ll be expecting you at seven in the morning on Monday,” he informs her.
Dr. Simpkins pats her on the back, a swift show of consolation before closing the door and moving on to his next appointment.
As my mother stares at the slip before stashing it in her purse, I’m able to make out enough of the doctor’s scribbling to see it’s not a prescription for medication. Instructions are written down for the hospital’s technician to Check for demise of fetus.
“He’s dead?”
This comes out before I consider what it will do to my mother. I’m only thinking of myself, my own hurt, how my little brother, and I’m sure it’s my baby brother, might be gone before I ever get a chance to meet him. My father and I have big plans. In a couple years, when he’s old enough, he’ll fill the third seat at all the Angels’ home games. I will teach him how to throw, how to catch and how to bat like Rod Carew and heavy hitter Brian Downing. I think of my mother and how she’s spent her entire pregnancy decorating his room in yellows, not just because it’s a neutral color, but also because it’s a cheerful one. I think of how it took my father half a day to figure out the directions to put together the new crib. Just yesterday my sister helped my mother string up the safari mobile—little stuffed zebras, lions, and giraffes hanging by invisible string. The changing table is equipped with baby powder, cloth diapers, and Baby Magic lotion. Our home smells and feels like my baby brother already lives in it.
Her strength has returned because my mother hugs me hard.
“We don’t know yet. Dr. Simpkins couldn’t hear a heartbeat. He said it’s a possibility.”
“So he’s making us go home, not knowing?”
“There’s nothing more he can do.”
There’s plenty more he could do. He could admit her into the hospital. They could run the test right now and find out. Sending her home, not knowing if she’s carrying around a dead baby, is cruel.
By the time we reach the car, my mother stops crying, and even insists on stopping off at 7-11 for my favorite dinosaur egg jawbreaker as my reward for having to wait so long at the doctor’s. When we get home, my father is still at the office, and she secludes herself in their bedroom where she’ll rest until dinner.
My sister and I are in charge of making it and she actually comes out of her room without threat or force. I boil pasta for spaghetti and my sister chops tomato, carrots, and red cabbage to make a salad. Something stops me from telling her what happened at the doctor’s, how our brother or sister may be dead. Guiltily, I like making dinner with her, and if I say anything she’ll want to comfort my mother and they’ll freeze me out.
Tonight, instead of eating in the dining room, we set up at the kitchen table. Before my father has a chance to finish his salad, my mother breaks the news that Dr. Simpkins couldn’t hear the baby’s heartbeat.
My father refuses to believe it. In his line of work, there’s almost always a catch, a way out.
His reaction is exactly what she’s expecting and her face visibly tires.
“He tried a couple of times, Paul.”
“Well, he didn’t try hard enough.” My father stuffs a forkful of pasta in his mouth, ignoring the rest of his salad. “That deaf old man probably couldn’t hear his own heart with a stethoscope.”
Nobody else at the table seems so convinced, though my mother lets it drop. Rhea serves herself a plate of what we’re eating. Of course, she’s eating the spaghetti noodles plain, no Prego sauce, not even melted butter or olive oil. My mother nudges her plate of spaghetti away but forces down a glass of whole milk, hopeful the baby still might need the calcium.
Worry has taken over all of us. It keeps us in the same room when usually, after dinner, we scatter. Instead of sprawling out on the family room floor, just inches from the TV, the way my father always does right after dinner, he sits on the couch beside my mother. One arm is behind her on the cushion, and he gently rubs her neck. With the other, he holds out the remote, channel surfing. Rhea collapses on a black and white polka dotted beanbag she brought in from her room, and I take a couch pillow and lay belly down on the floor.
My father decides on Magnum P.I., my mother’s favorite show because it takes place in Hawaii. We’d planned a trip there this summer before we learned my mother’s due date is in late September.
Halfway through the program, Kevin Cooper’s face suddenly appears on screen. It’s the same mug shot my mother and I saw the night we first heard he escaped. She turns up the sound.
“Paul.”
There’s no need for her to call out to him since he’s just in the kitchen, right next to the family room, and he can hear everything.
The female reporter is standing in front of a jail in Santa Barbara where Cooper has been arrested for raping a woman at knife point. My father comes back into the room, leaving the bag of popcorn he’d just popped in the microwave. After two months of running, Cooper has been captured. He was working as a deckhand for a couple and their five-year-old girl, with whom he’d sailed from Ensenada, Mexico, to Pelican Cove, just off Santa Barbara.
“I told you people he ran to Mexico,” my sister pronounces.
What she says isn’t what makes us laugh. We laugh for other reasons. We laugh in relief that Cooper’s finally been caught. We laugh that we’ll no longer have to blockade our sliders with big dining room chairs. We laugh at the awful dinner we just ate. We laugh at how I boiled the noodles for too long, how we didn’t even need to eat them with a fork since they stuck together in clumps like finger food. We laugh at how all of us ate the salad Rhea made even though she forgot the dressing.
My mother holds her belly and that’s when she cries out she feels it, buried deep inside the womb, the baby roused and agitated by the first sounds of family.
WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED
I turned your father down three times for a date. I had to. He was a football star and girls gave him anything he wanted. First he asked me when we were at a dance, then after he ran into me with my girlfriends at the drive-in. Finally, at the park while I was practicing with my drill team, he got my attention by nearly ramming into the fender of my powder blue M.G.
It was the way he apologized that got to me. Both of us were sorry it had come to that.
—June Priamos, ex-wife
I don’t care what anybody tells me. That stripper chick was in on it. You don’t get it. I know she was.
—Rhea Priamos
Your father showed up here once with a real pretty girl. Sorry, I can’t remember her name. She reminded me of Halle Berry. Smooth skin, short dark hair. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Man, neither could I.
—Luis Martinez, manager of Boca Grande
You watch out for Gil. I mean it. With your father gone, there’s no telling what he’s capable of. He wanted your father’s approval like he wanted your pappou’s. He never got either. How could he? Everybody knows he’s a psychopath. You know what he said while standing over his own father’s grave? “How long will it take before the maggots come.” Nobody said a word. Maybe they were too shocked, so I told him, “Apparently not long. One’s already here.”
—June Priamos
It’s not uncommon to begin the embalming procedures on the same day the deceased is brought in, especially if requested by the family.
—Antonio Sanchez, funeral director at Chapel of Remembrance
THE INSANITY DEFENSE
My brother