The room was dimly lit, its walls covered with pictures that made Naomi uneasy. She had been weeping and now she was trying to understand one picture that held her focus while she repeatedly wiped her face and blew her nose. The picture showed a long staircase that connected a shadowy field to a dark cloud.
“Am I supposed to go up the stairs or come down?”
“You are not in the picture,” Tambel said. Naomi’s spiritual adviser was a middle-aged man with an ample belly and full head of silver curls. “The young man you weep over might use the stairs when he returns to visit you, to mend your broken heart and give you hope.
“Return? He’s dead. I told you they found his remains near the school where I taught him. I called his foster parents and asked about the funeral. His mother said they didn’t know when it would be. The police have Raymond’s remains. When I asked his mother if I could help her with anything, she made a nasty noise and hung up. I was so hurt. Why would she do that?”
“So they found his remains. You should rejoice. That’s right, that’s right. He was a sad and lonely missing boy, a student you liked very much and felt sorry for, and now we know he’s been found. He is missing no more, and from what you say about his so-called mother, he’s in a better place.”
“You sound like my husband. He says Raymond is in a better place. I hate it when people say that. He’s dead. He was only seventeen. Someone murdered him. How could someone murder a sweet boy who wrote poetry? He’s dead. What’s better about it?”
“You don’t believe in an afterlife?”
“I used to.”
“Now you don’t because a student dies? You need to have a child. You told me you believe in a god and you pray,” Tambel said, his head tilted as he studied her. Naomi thought he was always looking for something about her to criticize. She thought he had that in common with her husband.
“I’ve tried to have a child. It’s like there’s a closed fist inside me. I’m almost forty. It’s too late. I married too late.”
“Then I don’t understand why you come here? You don’t follow my instructions. Pray and talk to your sad boy. Tell him you want a child. Ask him to help you conceive. You must approach his spirit gently. It’s not too late. I don’t care what all the doctors tell you. I’ve gotten women older than you pregnant.” Tambel started to smile, and then sat back suddenly, his lips pursed. “Your husband would not change his mind and adopt a child? Then maybe he doesn’t want children. Maybe he’s happy the way things are.”
Naomi studied Tambel’s lips. She thought he wore lipstick, always a pale shade that complimented the silk shirts he wore. He was highly recommended to her by several teacher friends. At times he was impatient with her. He would scold her for not trying all of the rituals and chants he prescribed, especially the ones involving whistling and dancing or crawling around her house. She thought they were too bizarre. Anyway, her knees were bad. One ritual was an obvious attempt to gain more of her money. But knowing that didn’t stop her from trying it. She saw herself slip two one-hundred dollar bills into the glass Tambel had given her. She then exhaled repeatedly into the glass until its interior was white with the stream of her breath. With a trembling finger she quickly wrote baby in the fading vapor and covered the glass with plastic wrap. She was soaked with sweat when she finished. Did that move the gods of procreation? Not as far as she knew. She returned the glass and its contents to Tambel at her next session.
“The murdered boy you cry over could have been your own son. That’s why you cry. He could still be your son, this gentle boy. He has the answers you seek.” Tambel said and turned over a tarot card. “But you lack courage. He cannot help a coward.”
“I’m not a coward. I’m—”
“What? You’re not sure? You don’t believe in my methods? Are you sick? You never told me. Do you suffer depression?”
“I’m sick with grief. What’s so strange? I mean sick with grief for Raymond.”
“Enough tears now.” Tambel tilted his head. “There’s no other sickness? Nothing strange in your relationship with this boy?”
“Oh please.”
“Then we must help you to communicate your feelings to this boy’s spirit. But first, I have made a list of things you must do to help yourself. If there are things on the list you cannot, or will not do, go on to the next prescription. You are such a baby. You are a very pretty baby when you’re not crying and your nose isn’t red. But you will not be pretty much longer. We must act fast. Read the list carefully. You must believe you can conceive. I’ll see you next week.”
“What do my looks have to do with getting—oh you mean being attractive to my husband.”
“Yes, of course I mean that.”
Naomi thought of Bruce who always seemed to be on the verge of sex with her. Sex had brought them together, was at the heart of their relationship. She took the list from Tambel. She was too tired to look at it and go over the five points with him. Fine Points, she thought and suppressed a smile until she was distance from Tambel’s house.
Naomi parked the car and then followed a walkway lined with flowers to a red brick building. It had windows with white shutters and flowers boxes filled with withered chrysanthemums. She had expected something windowless and severe, a building no one wanted to enter unless they had to identify a body. She was already upset, having left home after a fight with her husband who insisted that he was watching an art film and not pornography, as if she didn’t know the difference. Did he think she was blind or stupid? The images in her living room had upset her. Could those images interfere with her attempt to reach Raymond’s spirit? Why would women pose naked in a meat locker? Why would they drape their bodies over the carcasses of slaughtered animals? She would never have done that.
Naomi felt light-headed as she entered the building. She crept through a dark corridor into a long, well-lit room that was air conditioned though it was a cold January morning. Then she remembered where she was.
“May I help you?” The coroner’s lab coat was open and Naomi could see his gray and white striped shirt, gray trousers and green speckled tie. His thinning hair was neatly combed and his skin shone. She could smell his cologne which alternated with the less pleasant odors in the room.
“I’m—”
“What are you doing in here?”
“I am the boy’s mother,” Naomi said, adjusting her scarf.
“The boy’s mother?”
“Raymond, the boy they found in the woods near the school. The boy who was missing.”
“They told us the boy’s mother is dead.”
“That’s right. I’m his foster mother.” The coroner blinked and his mouth opened slightly. “What do you want?”
“His things. He had a school ring and he had a wallet,” Naomi said louder than intended. “Is Raymond in one of those drawers?”
“Would you please follow?”
“Where are you going?” Naomi didn’t move.
The Coroner walked past her into the darker corridor. Naomi felt nauseous for a moment and moved beside a stainless steel table that had several long scratches. She leaned on the table to steady herself.
The coroner returned with an older woman who looked agitated.
“Miss, you shouldn’t be in here. This room is not for the public or people who knew the victim.”
“I’m Raymond’s foster mother. Are his remains in one of those drawers? You must tell me.”
“Why must we tell you? We were told the boy’s mother is dead and no one knows where his father is.” The woman moved closer to Naomi.
The coroner made a gesture to the woman who nodded and took a deep breath. She reached for Naomi’s arm. Naomi pulled away.
“Don’t touch me.”
The coroner studied Naomi for a moment. “Miss, are you . . . not well?”
Naomi began to weep.
“I know you’re upset. Please come with me,” the woman said softly, “or I’ll have to call someone.”
“Did Raymond suffer?”
“We don’t know that. No one will know that for a while.”
“Raymond was a good son. I didn’t always let him know that. I was so busy all the time. I’m a teacher and—”
“A teacher?” The coroner looked at the woman who shook her head. “Where do you teach?”
“Tioga High School, near here. I took the day off. The last time I spoke to Raymond, “Naomi leaned on the table. “More than a year ago, he was wearing his school ring.” Naomi remembered how people discussed Raymond when he first went missing. The quiet boy is missing. The loner is missing. There were pictures of Raymond that didn’t look like him on walls and store windows. There were rumors about Raymond and drugs. A boy who knew him said he drank too much. Naomi wanted to believe that Raymond was unhappy and ran away from his foster home. There was a sadness in his eyes in the only picture that looked like him, a slender, blond young man she remembered handing her his class schedule. He looked more serious than her other students with a weariness about him that she had only seen in older people. When he told her he was glad to be in her class again, she was surprised. She couldn’t remember him as a former student of hers. She wondered why Raymond’s smile had annoyed her.
“Don’t you remember me?” Raymond looked hurt and then embarrassed.
“Oh sure,” Naomi lied. “Now I remember you, but I forget your name.”
“Raymond Hammond.”
“Raymond. Yes, I remember now. Raymond did you move or something?”
“I went to live with my aunt for a while. Now I live with—I’m back.”
“Oh come on, you came back because you missed us so much.” Naomi regretted her sarcastic laugh. It was one of her many attempts at humor with her students that failed.
Raymond forced a smile, revealing a broken front tooth. “Yeah, I guess so.”
She watched him make his way to an empty seat, his eyes lowered. His disappointment would repeat in her memory after he went missing. Unlike her other special education students, Raymond had been quiet, cooperative boy. His lack of self-esteem made learning difficult.
“Miss you can’t stay here,” the coroner said. “Go with Mrs. Mooney. She’ll give you some water and let you sit in her office. If you like, she can call someone to come and get you.”
“I can make you a cup of coffee,” Mrs. Mooney said. She was a large woman with limp shoulder-length brown hair. “We can talk for a while.”
“Oh don’t. I’ll be fine. I just wanted his things.”
“I don’t think I can give you those things just yet.”
Naomi’s eyes filled with tears. “I needed to know—I wanted to know—” Naomi staggered backward.
“Miss, have you been drinking?”
“No, no, I was not drinking. I have to make the funeral arrangements.” In Naomi’s mind she saw a casket thickly lined with satin and velvet, a casket snug as a womb.
“Is there someone we can call?” Mrs. Mooney approached her carefully, smiling sweetly. “Is there someone I can call? We’ll have someone come and get you.”
“Please don’t. I’ll go.” Naomi could no longer smell the coroner’s cologne. She didn’t know why she was feeling sorry for the coroner’s fastidiousness. She was sure he regretted becoming a coroner, having to deal with blood and foul smells, wounds that never heal. She thought he might regret becoming a coroner more than she regretted becoming a teacher. She found her way back to the entrance.
“Mrs.—please wait.” Mrs. Mooney handed Naomi an envelope. Inside the envelope she found Raymond’s school ring.
“Thank you! Oh god, thank you.” She grabbed Mrs. Mooney and hugged her.
When she reached the small park near her doctor’s office she pulled over. She took the ring from the envelope and put it on.
“Raymond, Raymond, darling boy that I loved. Remember the lesson about the stars, how I told the class we were made of the same elements as the stars? Remember the boy who started yelling at me?” She stopped then, hearing the rage in the boy’s voice. That means we’re dirt! Raymond, Raymond how you defended me, and now you are a star. Raymond, Raymond, Raymond.”
“What’s that you’re singing?” her gynecologist asked her.
“When you said I was barren,” Naomi replied. “I made up a song about a lunar landscape and a cursed field in a children’s story. I think the word barren is cruel and inappropriate.”
“But that’s the diagnosis,” Dr. Kirk said in an icy voice. “I told you to adopt. What’s the problem?”
“Cursed field.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Naomi didn’t like her position on the steel table, her legs splayed, and her feet in stirrups as her mind raced. She had seen so many doctors in the past five or six years. Gynecologists were insensitive, she thought, their bedside manner medieval. The one she was with was an old man with a crooked smile. She saw something in his eyes, a delight at her discomfort. In the beginning she thought he was a fatherly type and she had confided things she now regretted.
“Aren’t there any new procedure?” she asked hoping to ignite some compassion, a memory of something he’d read in a medical journal or overhead at a mandatory meeting he’d mostly slept through, anything that might help her conceive.
“I keep reading about old ladies getting pregnant. I’m only thirty-nine. Why can’t I?”
Dr. Kirk laughed politely as if she had told him a joke that wasn’t funny.
“Well Mrs.—” He looked at her chart.
“Call me Naomi.”
He frowned. “Why this obsession with having children? You’re a high school teacher. You must teach at least five classes a day, unless the schedule has changed since I was in high school. How many children do you need? There are other ways to leave a legacy, to tell future generations that you were beautiful, popular, successful, whatever. Too many women want a replica of themselves. They think they’re so gorgeous.”
“Legacy, replica? What the hell are you talking about? It isn’t vanity to want a child of your own. I want a child. I want a child! If you can’t help me say so, but don’t put some guilt trip on me. You don’t have the right. I told you things I wouldn’t tell my priest because I trusted you. Is that why you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you. I worry about you.”
“Why? Do you think I’m—mental or something?” she laughed softly. “Do you know what a friend told me?” Naomi propped herself on her elbow. “She said that after her first child, she felt connected to the cosmos. She stopped regretting her past.”
The doctor closed his eyes and Naomi watched his smile widen. He opened his eyes and stared at her for what seemed like a long time.
“I know what she meant,” Naomi said as if trying to convince him. “She’s my age and married late like I did. She lived her life, maybe wasted some of it, like I did. She said having a child was redemptive.”
“And you need redemption,” Dr. Kirk said leaving the room. “You got it,” he said over his shoulder. “You’re pregnant.”
Naomi pulled herself up and gaped at the ceiling. “What?”
A blond boy sitting in the first row looked up at her smiled. He had a broken front tooth. “We’re all stars,” he said dreamily, “all of us, s-t-a-a-a-r-r-r-s.”
