Never Coming Back(62)

“Remember your nippletops?” Brown said. “They were the nippletops of the century.”

“They were pretty awesome, weren’t they?”

We all made prayer hands and bowed our heads in the direction of Sunshine’s sinewed chest. She had decided to go flat in the wake of her surgery.

“There are some good names in the high peaks,” I said. “Like Marshall. Or Phelps. Or Cliff. Esther. McKenzie.”

“What about Grace?” Sunshine said. “I like Grace.”

“Grace is a good name,” Brown said. “Can’t go wrong with Grace.”

“It’s settled then. Grace can come for sleepovers when Winter and the boyfriend get sick of being parents. We’ll make her cinnamon rolls for breakfast.”

“With extra frosting because Winter won’t be around to stop us.”

“We’ll play Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders with her. You know damn well Winter and the boyfriend won’t.”

They were off and running, configuring out loud how they could put a toddler bed into the corner of the study, next to the window. How they would have to move the cleaning supplies to a high shelf during the toddler years. How Winter and the boyfriend could list them on school emergency forms so they could pick her up if she had a fever. How they would be Grace’s cool aunt and uncle, which meant that Grace would, in a way, love them more than she would love Winter and the boyfriend. Maybe they should start collecting stuffed animals and picture books for Gracie now. What about a college fund? You were supposed to start those things early, right? Even fifty dollars a month would be a help to Gracie eighteen years from now.

“She’s already gone from Grace to Gracie?” I said, and they looked at me patiently.

“Of course she’s Gracie,” Brown said, and Sunshine nodded. “You can’t call a little baby Grace.”

There was a time, with Sunshine and Brown, a year after the second diagnosis and the second surgery, when they were hell-bent on adoption. The same conversations, about where the baby would sleep and what if there were more than one baby, sibling adoption maybe, or twins, two for one, and was Old Forge Elementary a good school, and what if their kiddo or kiddos—they had already progressed to “kiddo or kiddos”—were bullied on the school bus. Should they go straight to the principal or should they begin with the bus driver? Or maybe go straight to the bully, circumvent the authorities entirely? All that talk stopped after Sunshine’s third diagnosis, when they were told that people with certain recurrent health conditions were not adoption-eligible.

“Have a baby, Clara,” Sunshine said. “Have a baby so we can baby-proof the house and sing her lullabies and read her picture books.”

“And stop the bullies,” Brown said. “And make her great Halloween costumes.”

They were joking, except they weren’t.

“Just do it?” I said. “Like the Nike ad?”

“Yeah,” Sunshine said, and Brown said, “Yeah. Do it for us.”

A tall boy appeared in the doorway, dark hair obscuring his eyes, one arm around skinny little Blue Mountain. An imaginary visitor from the parallel world, not allowed over the doorsill. A look passed over Sunshine’s face, as if she saw something too. Maybe her own parallel-world children, growing up there without her.





* * *





The bartender was telling me about his early days in Rochester, about his grandmother and his too-young, too-drugged parents.

“So your grandmother raised you?” I said.

“She did. From three on, anyway. After the DSS stepped in.”

It was a freak-cold day in late fall, colder than cold, the kind of cold that sweeps in upon the Adirondacks on gale-force winds from the Arctic north or the stormy Atlantic, precursor to the months of winter that will follow. The bartender and I had met at Walt’s for breakfast and now we were wandering the streets of Old Forge, if wander was a word used to describe two people hunched deep into their collars, gloved hands shoved into their coat pockets, hatted heads bent low against the gale, winter-booted feet trudging forward, ever forward. My hat was one of Sunshine’s, her very first scallion, an experimental hat far too big for a baby’s head. Or even my own head.

“Are you cold?” the bartender said. I could barely hear his words against the wind, the scarf, the hunched-collarness of the conversation.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not at all. Who could possibly be cold in this balmy weather.”

If you take the question mark off the end of the question, it transforms itself into a sarcastic statement. You can do this with your voice or on paper. Either way, it works.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” the bartender said, “can we please go inside.”

The bartender knew the power of an un-question-marked question too, apparently.

“Apparently we will have to,” I said. “It’s either that or face the certainty of death by Adirondacks-in-winter-ness.”

I was consciously using the word apparently inside and outside my head as much as possible in an attempt at the reverse of aversion therapy. The more the Life Care people said apparently, the more I too said apparently. In that way I would grow accustomed to it and stop wincing internally every time I heard it. In that way I would stop associating the word apparently with everything that my mother had lost and everything that she would keep losing. That was my hope.