It was Charlie who gave the baby his name. The drugs had disguised Fay, hidden her under thick blankets of light and sound. The appearance of her son, finally, after thirty-six hours, had not made words more available. Just the fragility of his head, how easily it could break, cowed her, checked her impulse to touch him. How could she name him, narrow his life that way? “You do it,” she said to Charlie, who had appeared, cigar already lit, halfway through. In a letter a month before, Fay had offered a rough due date but not an invitation. Rather than bringing them in with the rest of their letters and bills, their parents had left the envelopes from Charlie, two a week for almost half a year, in the mailbox for Fay to find on her own. If she left one half-read on the kitchen table it appeared soon after under her door.
“How did you know to be here?” Fay asked, time wobbling between the walls of the aquamarine hospital room. Thoughts seemed to be arriving in the wrong place, a taste in her mouth or a weight in her hand. How to confirm that her sister was indeed near her, her son still not arrived. It was the smell she finally trusted, the singular odor of Charlie, pomade and tobacco and pine-scented mop solution.
“Been calling around different hospitals in the area for about two weeks,” Charlie said, rolling the baseball cap she held in her hands. “Pretending to be the father. Some of those nurses got pretty fond of me by the end. It’s sort of a shame they’d be disappointed to see the body attached to those vocal cords. Particularly Lindy. I sang to Lindy while she looked up records and whatnot. Lindy sounded like a hot mug of water.”
“It’s ‘cool glass of water,’ supposed to be.” Fay was trying to get her hands to spread, trying to prop herself up. “‘Tall drink of water.’”
“Have you ever had hot water? With lemon and honey? When you really needed it?”
Fay was laughing and crying, the two feelings coming to her at the same time like warring radios. There was the sound of nurses speaking in the hall, there was the pinch of her legs as Charlie settled herself at the foot of the narrow bed.
“Lloyd sends his regrets. Couldn’t make it. Thought this might be the weekend he’d finally lick his own asshole.”
“What do you think I’m doing in this hospital”—Fay was imagining her tongue pushing the words out as she said them—“but attempting to do exactly that. Safer with medical supervision.” She made a monocle of her thumb and index, the other fingers framing her cheek, then smiled as if surprised at her new talent. The high was cresting, holding her open.
Charlie nodded. “A very good prank on the folks. No progeny, but—”
The cigar she replaced with a Lucky, which dangled about three-quarters across her bottom lip, an indication she was happy and settled. Recognizing this raised Fay’s body temperature, and then with a wave of the drug she disappeared into a worry. What did it mean that it had not truly bothered her to be without this, old signs of old love? Five months she had been with her parents. If she had sometimes felt starved of conversation, missed the path an overheard argument cut, in the main she had not been unhappy, had filled her pockets with fallen buckeyes and felt glad not to answer any questions. Was it wrong to believe you went on as yourself even in the absence of the people who helped you become it? She thought of Vincent rarely, how he might have reacted even less. She was glad to be without whatever comfort he might have offered in the hour he had to spare, and anyway she could not be sure. There had been the man in Los Angeles, there had been the look on his face above her, more determined than Vincent’s, less compromised. It would be easier to raise the son of a man she had not known than the son of a man she had failed to. In the hospital her mind snapped to certainty about it, that it was his, Raymond’s. Her limp hand in her sister’s stringy, sun-speckled one, she followed the relief of this to sleep.
WHEN HE CAME FAY WAS surprised by his weight, the fact of it when divided from her body. She kissed him vaguely, near his left ear, and he coughed. Charlie waited with her hands clasped behind her back, her chin tucked, and when Fay handed him up and Charlie spoke she was equally hard to place, the salt gone from her voice.
“What’ll you call him,” she said. “If I press my thumb here”—she pointed at the chin—“will he have a cleft or what. What will his name be?”
Fay was aware now of the doctor and the nurses, how they were waiting to take him to some station of sanitization or to offer some remedy. What was wrong with him? Claudette and James stood in the background, polished and withdrawn as people waiting to see a priest. She could not remember anymore which names she had considered. All names sounded like people she already knew, people who had failed to fill the spectacular title of her son.
“I can’t, I don’t think.”
“Wright,” Charlie said.
“Like the flying brothers?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Wright!”
“Wright.”
Hearing his name where Charlie held him on her chest, Wright curled a hand in resignation. It seemed he was gesturing back toward Fay, toward back where he’d come from, as if to say he had not been told, had not been ready.