Commonwealth (4 page)

About the time he started really looking at the car, which seemed somehow sexy just by virtue of its being French, he remembered the baby was missing. He thought of his own baby, Jeanette, who had just learned to walk. Her forehead was bruised from where she had careened into the glass yesterday, the Band-Aids were still in place, and he panicked to think he was supposed to be watching her. Little Jeanette, he had no idea where he'd left her! Teresa should have known he wasn't any good at keeping up with the baby. She shouldn't have trusted him with this. But when he came out of the garage to try and find her, his heart punching at his ribs as if it wanted to go ahead of him, he saw all the people at Fix Keating's party. The proper order of the day was returned to him and he stood for another moment holding on to the door, feeling both ridiculous and relieved. He hadn't lost anything.

When he looked back up at the sky he saw the light was
changing. He would tell Fix he needed to go home, he had his own kids to worry about. He went inside to find a bathroom and found two closets first. In the bathroom, he stopped to splash some water on his face before coming out again. On the other side of the hallway there was yet another door. It wasn't a big house but it seemed to be made entirely of doors. He opened the door in front of him and found the light inside was dim. The shades were down. It was a room for little girls—a pink rug, a pink wallpaper border featuring fat rabbits. There was a room not unlike this in his own house that Holly shared with Jeanette. In the corner he saw three small girls sleeping on a twin bed, their legs crossed over one another's legs, their fingers twisted in one another's hair. Somehow the only thing he failed to notice was Beverly Keating standing at the changing table with the baby. Beverly looked at him, a smile of recognition coming over her face.

“I know you,” she said.

She had startled him, or her beauty startled him again. “I'm sorry,” he said. He put his hand on the door.

“You're not going to wake them up.” She tilted her head towards the girls. “I think they're drunk. I carried them in here one at a time and they never woke up.”

He went over and looked at the girls, the biggest one no more than five. He couldn't help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. “Is one of them yours?” he asked. They all three looked vaguely similar. None of them looked like Beverly Keating.

“Pink dress,” she said, her attention on the diaper in her hand. “The other two are her cousins.” She smiled at him. “Aren't you supposed to be fixing drinks?”

“Spencer left,” he said, though that didn't answer the question. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been nervous, not in the face of criminals or juries, certainly not in the face of women
holding diapers. He started again. “Your husband asked me to find the baby.”

Finished with her work, Beverly rearranged the baby's dress and lifted her up from the table. “Well, here she is,” she said. She touched her nose to the baby's nose and the baby smiled and yawned. “Somebody's been awake a long time.” Beverly turned towards the crib.

“Let me take her out to Fix for a minute,” he said. “Before you put her down.”

Beverly Keating tilted her head slightly to one side and gave him a funny look. “Why does Fix need her?”

It was everything, the pale pink of her mouth in the darkened pink room, the door that was closed now though he didn't remember closing it, the smell of her perfume which had somehow managed to float gently above the familiar stench of the diaper pail. Had Fix asked him to bring the baby back or just to find her? It didn't make any difference. He told her he didn't know, and then he stepped towards her, her yellow dress its own source of light. He held out his arms and she stepped into them, holding out the baby.

“Take her then,” she said. “Do you have children?” But by then she was very close and she lifted up her face. He put one arm under the baby, which meant he was putting his arm beneath her breasts. It wasn't a year ago she'd had this baby and while he didn't know what she'd looked like before it was hard to imagine she had ever looked any better than this. Teresa never pulled herself together. She said it wasn't possible, one coming right after the next. Wouldn't he like to introduce the two of them, just to show his wife what could be done if you cared to try. Scratch that. He had no interest in Teresa meeting Beverly Keating. He put his other arm around her back, pressed his fingers into the straight line of her zipper. It was the magic of gin and orange juice. The baby balanced between
the two of them and he kissed her. That was the way this day was turning out. He closed his eyes and kissed her until the spark he had felt in his fingers when he touched her hand in the kitchen ran the entire shivering length of his spine. She put her other hand against the small of his back while the tip of her tongue crossed between his parted teeth. There was an almost imperceptible shift between them. He felt it, but she stepped back. He was holding the baby. The baby cried for a second, a single red-faced wail, and then issued a small hiccup and pressed into Cousins's chest.

“We're going to smother her,” she said, and laughed. She looked down at the baby's pretty face. “Sorry about that.”

The small weight of the Keating girl was familiar in his arms. Beverly took a soft cloth from the changing table and wiped over his mouth. “Lipstick,” she said, then she leaned over and kissed him again.

“You are—” he started, but too many things came into his head to say just one.

“Drunk,” she said, and smiled. “I'm drunk is all. Go take the baby to Fix. Tell him I'll be there in just a minute to get her.” She pointed her finger at him. “And don't tell him anything else, mister.” She laughed again.

He realized then what he had known from the first minute he saw her, from when she leaned out the kitchen door and called for her husband. This was the start of his life.

“Go,” she said.

She let him keep the baby. She went to the other side of the room and started to arrange the sleeping girls into more comfortable positions. He stood at the closed bedroom door for one more minute to watch her.

“What?” she said. She wasn't being flirtatious.

“Some party,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

In one sense only had Fix been right to send him out to find the baby: nobody knew him at this party and it had been easy for him to move through the crowd. It was something Cousins hadn't realized until now when everyone turned their head in his direction. A woman as trim and tan as a stick stepped right in front of him.

“There she is!” she cried, and leaned in to kiss the yellow curls that feathered the baby's head, leaving a wine stain of lipstick. “Oh,” she said, disappointed in herself. She used her thumb to try to wipe it up and the baby tightened her features as if she might cry. “I shouldn't have done that.” She looked at Cousins and smiled at him. “You won't tell Fix it was me, will you?”

It was an easy promise to make. He'd never seen the tan woman before.

“There's our girl,” a man said, smiling at the baby as he patted Cousins on the back. Who did they think he was? No one asked him. Dick Spencer was the only person who knew him at all and he was long gone. As he cut a slow path to the kitchen he was stopped and encircled over and over again.
Oh, the baby
, they said in soft voices.
Hey there, pretty girl.
The compliments and kind words surrounded him. She was a very good-looking baby, he could see it now that they were in the light. This one looked more like the mother, the fair skin, the wide-set eyes, everybody said so.
Just like Beverly
. He jostled her up in the crook of his arm. Her eyes would open and then close again, blue beacons checking to see if she was still in his arms. She was as comfortable with him as any of his own children were. He knew how to hold a baby.

“She sure likes you,” a man wearing a gun in a shoulder harness said.

In the kitchen a group of women sat smoking. They tapped their ashes in their cups, signaling they were done. There was nothing left to do but wait for their husbands to tell them it was time to go home. “Hey there, baby,” one of them said, and they all looked up at Cousins.

“Where's Fix?” he asked.

One of them shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. “Do you have to go now? I'll take her.” She held out her hands.

But Cousins wasn't about to turn her over to strangers. “I'll find him,” he said, and backed away.

Cousins felt like he had been walking in a circle around Fix Keating's house for the last hour, first looking for the baby and then looking for Fix. He found him on the back patio talking to the priest. The priest's girl was nowhere in sight. There were fewer people outside now, fewer people everywhere. The angle of the light coming through the orange trees had lowered considerably. He saw a single orange high above his head, an orange that had somehow been overlooked in the frenzy to make juice, and he raised up on his toes, the baby balanced in one arm, and picked it.

“Jesus,” Fix said, looking up. “Where have you been?”

“Looking for you,” Cousins said.

“I've been right here.”

Cousins nearly made a crack about Fix not bothering to try and find him but then he thought better of it. “You're not where I left you.”

Fix stood up and took the baby from him without gratitude or ceremony. She issued a small sound of discontent at the transfer, then settled against her father's chest and went to sleep. Cousins's arm was weightless now and he didn't like it. He didn't like it one
bit. Fix looked at the stain on the top of her head. “Did somebody drop her?”

“It's lipstick.”

“Well,” said the priest, pushing out of his chair. “That's it for me. We've got a spaghetti supper back at the church in half an hour. Everyone's welcome.”

They said their goodnights, and as Father Joe Mike walked away he grew a tail of parishioners who followed him down the driveway, Saint Patrick marching through Downey. They waved their hands at Fix and called goodnight. It wasn't night, but neither was it fully day. The party had gone on entirely too long.

Cousins waited another minute, hoping that Beverly would come back for the baby like she'd said, but she didn't come, and it was hours past time for him to go. “I don't know her name,” he said.

“Frances.”

“Really?” He looked again at the pretty girl. “You named her for yourself?”

Fix nodded. “Francis got me into a lot of fights when I was a kid. There was no one in the neighborhood who forgot to tell me I had a girl's name, so I figured, why not name a girl Frances?”

“What if she'd been a boy?” Cousins asked.

“I would have named him Francis,” Fix said, yet again making Cousins feel he had asked a stupid question.

“When the first one was a girl we named her after Kennedy's daughter. I thought, that's fine, I'll wait, but now—” Fix stopped, looking down at his daughter. There had been a miscarriage between the two girls, fairly late. They were lucky to get this second one, that's what the doctor had said, though there was no point in telling that to the deputy district attorney. “It works out this way.”

“It's a good name,” Cousins said, but what he thought was,
Lucky you didn't wait
.

“What about you?” Fix said. “You've got a little Albert at home?”

“My son's name is Calvin. We call him Cal. And the girls, no. No Albertas.”

“But you've got one coming up.”

“In December,” he said. Cousins remembered how it was before Cal was born, how he and Teresa would lie in bed at night saying names to one another in the dark. One name would remind her of a kid who got picked on in grade school, a kid who wore stained shirts and bit his thumbs. Some other name would remind him of a boy he never liked, a bully, but when they got to Cal both of them were happy. It was something like that when they were thinking up names for Holly, too. Maybe they'd spent less time on it, maybe they didn't talk about it in bed, her head up on his shoulder, his hand on her stomach, but they'd picked it out together. She wasn't named for anybody, just for herself, because her parents thought it was a beautiful name. And Jeanette? He didn't even remember talking about a name for Jeanette. He'd been late getting to the hospital just that one time and if memory served he'd gone into the room and Teresa said,
This is Jeanette.
She would have been Daphne if anyone had asked him about it. They should talk about what they were going to name this new one. It would give them something to talk about.

“Name this one Albert,” Fix said.

“If it's a boy.”

“It'll be a boy. You're due.”

Cousins looked at Frances asleep in her father's arms. It wouldn't be the worst thing if they had another girl, but if it was a boy then maybe they would call him Albert. “You think?”

“Absolutely,” Fix said.

He never did talk about it with Teresa but he was there in the waiting room when the baby was born and he filled out the birth
certificate—Albert John Cousins—after himself. Teresa had never much liked her husband's name but when would there have been an opportunity to bring that up? As soon as they were home from the hospital she started calling the baby Albie, Al-
bee
. Cousins told her not to but he wasn't ever around. What was he going to do, stop her? The other kids liked it. They called the baby Albie, too.

2

“So you're telling me that you named Albie?” Franny said.

“I didn't name Albie,” her father said, the two of them following the nurse down a long, bright hall. “If I'd named Albie I wouldn't have given him such a stupid name. You could trace a lot of that kid's problems back to his name.”

Franny thought of her stepbrother. “There was probably more to it than that.”

“Did you know I got him out of Juvenile once? Fourteen years old and he tried to set his school on fire.”

“I remember,” Franny said.

“Your mother called and asked me to get him out.” He tapped his chest. “She said it would be a favor to her, like I was so interested in doing her favors. When you think about all the cops Bert knew in L.A. you have to wonder why they were bothering me.”

“You helped Albie,” she said. “He was a kid and you helped him. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“He didn't even know how to set a decent fire. I drove him over to see your uncle Tom at the fire station once I got him out. Tom was back in L.A. then. I said to Bert's kid, ‘You want to burn up a
school full of children then these are the guys who can teach you how to do it.' You know what he said to me?”

“I do,” Franny said, not pointing out that there had been no children in the school when Albie had set it on fire, and that he'd done a pretty good job. Say what you will for Albie, he knew how to set things on fire.

“He said he wasn't interested anymore.” Fix stopped, which made Franny stop, and then the nurse stopped too to wait for them. “People don't still call him that, do they?” Fix asked.

“Albie? I don't know. That's what I've always called him.”

“I'm trying not to listen to this,” Jenny said. The nurse's name was Jenny. She was wearing a name tag but that didn't matter, they knew her.

“You can listen to anything you want,” Fix said. “But we should be telling better stories.”

“How are you feeling today, Mr. Keating?” Jenny asked. Fix had come to the UCLA Medical Center for chemotherapy so the question wasn't entirely social. If you didn't feel well they sent you home and the entire process was pushed even further out into the unknowable future.

“Feeling fine,” he said, his arm hooked through Franny's. “Feeling like light on the water.”

Jenny laughed and the three of them stopped in a large, open room off the hall where two women wearing head wraps sat with digital thermometers in their mouths. One of them gave the newcomers a tired nod while the other stared ahead. All around them the nurses came and went in their candy-colored scrubs. Fix sat down and Jenny gave him a thermometer and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm. Franny took the empty chair next to her father.

“Just to get back to the original point for a minute, you and Bert
talked about what he should name his son before Albie was born?” Franny had heard the story about the fire and the phone call that came after it a hundred times but somehow the one about Albie's name had never come up before.

Fix took the thermometer out. “It wasn't like we talked about it later.”

“Hey!” Jenny said, pointing, and Fix put the thermometer back in his mouth.

Franny shook her head. “It's just hard to believe.”

Fix turned his eyes up to Jenny, who unwrapped the cuff. “What's hard to believe?” she said for him.

“All of it.” Franny opened her hands. “You and Bert making drinks together, you and Bert speaking, you knowing Bert before Mom did.”

“Ninety-eight on the nose,” Jenny said, and ejected the plastic thermometer sleeve into the trash. Then she pulled a length of bright-pink tourniquet out of her pocket and tied it around Fix's upper arm.

“Of course I knew Bert,” he said, as if he were being denied the credit he was due. “How do you think your mother met him?”

“I don't know.” It wasn't a question she'd ever thought to ask. There was no time in her memory before Bert. “I guess I thought Wallis introduced them. You hated Wallis so much.”

Jenny was kneading the inside of Fix's elbow with her fingertips, searching for a vein that might still be open for business.

“I've known junkies who shot between their toes,” Fix said with something approaching nostalgia.

“One more reason you don't want a junkie for a nurse.” She tapped another minute on the papery skin and then smiled, holding the vein in place with one finger. “Okay, mister, here we go. A little stick.”

Fix didn't flinch. Somehow she had managed to slip the needle straight in. “Oh, Jenny,” he said, looking into the part of her hair as she bent over him. “I wish it could always be you.”

“Did you really hate Wallis so much?” Jenny asked. She plugged in a rubber-topped vial and watched it fill up with blood, then she filled another.

“I did.”

“Poor Wallis.” She slipped out the needle and taped a cotton ball in place. “Just hop up on the scale and then I'll be done with you.”

Fix got on the scale and watched as she tapped the metal weight back with one fingernail. Tap-tap down, another pound, another, until the scale balanced at 133. “You're drinking your Boost?”

When they were finished with what were called the preliminaries, they went farther down the same hall, past the nurses' station, where doctors stood reading reports on computer screens or their phones. They went into the large, sunny room where the patients lay tilted back in recliners, tethered to trickling streams of chemicals. Someone had turned the volume off on all the televisions, which meant they were freed from commercials but left with the discordant beeping of monitors. Jenny led Franny and Fix to two chairs in the corner. It was a gift, considering how busy the chemo room was. Everyone with the energy for preference preferred the corner chairs.

“I hope you have a good day once this is over,” Jenny said. Jenny didn't administer chemo. It was only her job to get the chart ready for the nurse who would take over his case from there.

Fix thanked her and then settled in, using both hands to push himself into the recliner. When his head tilted back and his feet levered up he gave the small sigh of a cop in his chair at the end of a long day on the beat. He closed his eyes. For five full minutes
he stayed so still that Franny thought he'd gone to sleep before the line was even started. She wished she'd thought to bring a magazine with her from the waiting room and was just starting to look around the treatment room, because sometimes magazines got left in there, when her father went back to his story.

“Wallis was a bad influence,” he said, eyes still closed. “She was always sitting in our kitchen going on about liberation and free love. What you have to remember about your mother is that she didn't have her own character. She turned into whoever she was sitting next to. When she was sitting next to Miss Free Love then free love sounded like a great idea.”

“It was the sixties,” Franny said, glad he was awake. “You can't pin the whole thing on Wallis.”

“I'll pin anything I want on Wallis.”

It probably wasn't a bad idea. Wallis had died ten years before of colon cancer, and for all her talk of free love and liberation, she had stuck it out with Larry, who she had married when she was a junior in college. Larry saw her out of her life as patiently as he had seen her through it—giving her bed baths, counting her pills, changing her colostomy bag. Larry and Wallis had moved to Oregon after Larry sold his optometry practice. They grew blueberries and paid an extraordinary amount of attention to their dogs because their children and grandchildren so rarely had the time to visit. Wallis and Beverly had been maintaining their friendship from opposite sides of the country since they were twenty-nine years old, since Beverly left for Virginia to marry Bert Cousins, so Wallis's late-life move hadn't affected them at all. Los Angeles, Oregon, what difference did it make when you lived in Virginia? If anything, they were closer after the move because Wallis had no one but Larry and the dogs to talk to. Beverly and Wallis had e-mail and free long
distance now. They talked for hours. They sent birthday presents to one another, funny cards. When Beverly married her third husband, Jack Dine, Wallis flew from Oregon to Arlington to be the matron of honor, as she had been the maid of honor at Beverly's wedding to Fix, but not in Beverly's wedding to Bert, which had been conducted privately and without friends at Bert's parents' house outside Charlottesville. Later, when Wallis got sick, Beverly flew to Oregon and they sat up in the bed together and read Jane Kenyon's poetry aloud. They talked about the things in life that had mystified them—mostly their children and their husbands. Wallis hadn't liked Fix Keating any more than he liked her, and she never minded that he assigned to her full responsibility for things that could not possibly have been her fault. If she could shoulder the burden of his blame while she was alive, it was hard to imagine she'd be bothered by it now.

“Are you cold?” Franny asked her father. “I can get you a blanket.”

Fix shook his head. “I don't get cold now. I get cold later. They'll bring me a blanket when I need one.”

Franny looked around the room for the nurse without letting her eyes linger on any of the patients—the woman asleep with her mouth open, hairless as a newborn mouse, the teenaged boy tapping on his iPad, the woman whose six-year-old sat quietly in the chair next to hers and colored in a book. How had chemo gone for Wallis? Did Larry drop her off or did he sit with her? Did their sons come up from L.A.? She would have to remember to ask her mother.

“They're slow getting started today,” Franny said, not that it mattered. The soup and the bread that Fix wouldn't eat were ready at the house. Marjorie would be waiting for them. They would watch
Jeopardy!
Franny would sleep in the guest room upstairs.

“Never be in a rush to have someone poison you. That's my motto. I can sit here all day.”

“When did you get to be so patient?”

“The patient patient,” he said, pleased with himself. “So do you and Albie keep in touch?”

Franny shrugged. “I hear from him.” Franny had talked about Albie too much in her life, and now, as if she could make up for it, she made a point of not talking about him at all.

“And what about old Bert? How's he doing?”

“He seems okay.”

“Do you talk to him very often?” Fix asked, the soul of innocence.

“Not nearly as often as I talk to you.”

“It isn't a contest.”

“No, it's not.”

“And he's married now?”

Franny shook her head. “Single.”

“But there was a third one.”

“Didn't work out.”

“Wasn't there a fiancée though? Somebody after the third one?” Fix knew full well that Bert had had a third divorce but he never tired of hearing about it.

“There was for a while.”

“And the fiancée didn't work out either?”

Franny shook her head.

“Well, that's a shame,” Fix said, sounding as if he meant it, and maybe he did, but he had asked her the same questions a month before and he would ask her again a month from now, pretending that he was old and sick and didn't remember their last conversation. Fix
was
old and sick, but he remembered everything. Keep examining the witness—that's what he had told her over the phone
when she was a kid and her ID bracelet had gone missing from her locker. She had called him from Virginia at five o'clock, the minute the rates went down, two o'clock California time. She called him at work. She had never called him at work before but she had his business card. He was a detective by then, and he was her father, so she figured he'd know how to find the bracelet.

“Ask around,” her father had told her. “Find out who was changing classes and where they were going. You don't need to make a big deal about it, don't let anyone think you're accusing them, but you talk to every kid who walked down that hall and then talk to them again because either there's something they're keeping from you or there's something they haven't remembered yet themselves. You have to be willing to put in the time if you're serious about finding it.”

Patsy was his nurse today, a child-sized Vietnamese woman who swam in her XXS lavender scrubs. She waved at him from across the crowded room as if it were a party and she had finally caught his eye. “You're here!” she said.

“I'm here,” he said.

She came to him, her black hair braided and the braid caught up in a doubled loop like a rope to be used in the case of true emergency. “You're looking good, Mr. Keating,” she said.

“The three stages of life: youth, middle age, and ‘You're looking good, Mr. Keating.'”

“It all depends on where I see you. I see you at the beach lying on a towel in your swim trunks, I don't think you look so good. But here”—Patsy dropped her voice and looked around the room. She leaned in close. “Here you look good.”

Fix unbuttoned the top buttons on his shirt and pulled it back, offering her the port in his chest. “Did you meet my daughter Franny?”

“I know Franny,” Patsy said, and gave Franny the smallest raise of the eyebrow, universal shorthand for
The old man is forgetting
. She pushed a large syringe of saline to clear the port. “Tell me your full name.”

“Francis Xavier Keating.”

“Date of birth.”

“April 20, 1931.”

“That's the winning ticket,” she said, and pulled three clear plastic pouches from the pockets of her scrub top. “Oxaliplatin, 5FU, and this little one is just an antiemetic.”

“Good,” Fix said, nodding. “Plug 'em in.”

From outside the seventh-story window the bright Los Angeles morning came slanting in across the linoleum floor. Patsy skated off to the nurses' station to input the details of treatment while Fix stared up at the silent advertisement playing on the television that hung from the ceiling. A woman walking through a rainstorm was drenched and dripping, lightning shooting down around her. Then a handsome stranger handed her his umbrella and as soon as he did the rain stopped. The street was now some British gardener's idea of the afterlife, all sunshine and roses. The woman's hair was dry and billowing, and her dress trailed behind her like butterfly wings. The words “Ask Your Doctor” parked across the top of the screen, as if the advertisers had anticipated everyone turning off the sound. Franny wondered if the drug was for depression, an overactive bladder, thinning hair.