You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  Maggie was tired of the way Lucy pretended everything was fine when it was not.

  Pretending is what the Painter family did.

  Across the street at the Mallorys’ house, the twins were fighting on the front porch, Daniel slamming Luke with his book bag, Luke falling backwards, crying for his mother, his mother calling down from the upstairs window to “stop fighting.” Maggie didn’t like the Mallory twins. Certainly not Daniel.

  But she loved their mother, Zee, who kissed her fingers and ruffled her frizzy red curls and told her she was the most interesting girl Zelda Mallory had ever met.

  “You’re so delicious,” Zee would say with delight.

  Across the street, Maggie saw Maeve Sewall come out of her front door and look up at August Russ’s house. Her head was tilted back, her hands covering her mouth, and all of a sudden she was screaming.

  AT HER DRAWING table working on Vermillion’s round black eyes, Lucy heard Maeve’s scream and rushed to the wide window of her studio just as August Russ, clinging to the top rung of an old extension ladder, floated by the window.

  Lucy watched almost to the last moment.

  The way he fell like a dancer, not even struggling, one leg straight out as if to catch his landing. The expression on his beautiful face registering only mild surprise as he passed close enough for her to reach through the glass and touch his olive skin. Nothing in his appearance to suggest alarm. Simply wide-eyed astonishment that in the middle of cleaning gutters, he had found himself in a free fall careening to a reversal of fortune at 8:40 in the morning.

  The avenue was sprinkled with children on their way to school. In the corner of her eye, she caught a splash of red, maybe Maggie’s hair as she crossed the street where she was meeting Maeve. Not in harm’s way, no child as far as Lucy could tell at that glance would be in the line of the ladder’s fall.

  She held her breath, mesmerized by the elegant drama of August’s descent, by the way he turned his head just so, assessing, as if he had time to reconsider. And then just before he landed, the ladder almost parallel to the avenue, she turned away from the window, unable to watch the inevitable conclusion. His body splayed on the asphalt as it would be, under the extension ladder—the fall three stories high, the ladder heavy. Like railroad tracks covering him, is how Lucy saw it, having no trouble imagining the scene.

  The children on their way to school had begun to scream. They must have seen the extension ladder as it went down. Maggie must have seen it hitting the street directly in front of the Sewalls’ house not far from where she would have been waiting to walk to school with Maeve.

  Lucy sank to the floor, resting her head on her knees, barely breathing.

  After she discovered that her father had killed himself, after she saw his feet dangling and knew not to look up at this face, she was for a moment completely rigid. And then in a single move turning, she had rushed up the stairs, grabbed his boots in her arms, opened the front door and closed it behind her. Since that afternoon, her body in an emergency went quiet as if she were falling into sleep, her eyes open, fixed on a spot which at that moment was the taupe-colored underskin of her arm.

  She could hear the shouts of children but in the distance.

  In the corner of the studio, Felix, stretched out on his stomach, was playing war with painted metal soldiers which had belonged to Lucy’s father when he was growing up.

  “What happened, Mama?” he asked.

  “I’ll check in just a second,” Lucy said, her voice too thin to carry.

  “I’m playing Viet Nam,” he said.

  In the distance, the screech of advancing sirens.

  Across the room, Felix had gotten up from war and was padding barefoot across the hardwood floor in the direction of the window overlooking Witchita Avenue.

  “Don’t climb up to the window, Felix,” she said, but she was satisfied that he was too small to reach the view of the street.

  Downstairs, the front door opened and slammed—a crash against the wall, the sound of breaking glass.

  Maggie was racing up the steps to the second floor, her sneakers slapping through the bedroom and into the closet where the steps to the third-floor studio were concealed.

  Lucy didn’t move, didn’t lift her head, waiting for Maggie and her accumulating temper to arrive, bracing for it.

  “Mama!” She was out of breath. “What are you doing sitting on the floor? Can’t you hear the sirens?” Maggie asked.

  “I hear them,” Felix said quietly.

  “Something terrible has happened and all the other mothers are helping out.”

  Lucy’s heart was beating in her throat, uneasy with Maggie, even a little afraid of her as she headed ferociously into her last year of childhood.

  “August Russ fell from the top of his house and his ladder fell on top of him and he’s lying in the street maybe dead and the ambulances are coming and the fire department and every other mother on this street is there trying to save him.”

  Lucy grabbed the edge of the table and pulled herself up.

  “Dead?” Felix asked.

  “Not dead,” Lucy said quickly.

  “Zee says the children have to go to her house and talk about what happened.”

  “Not go to school?” Lucy asked.

  “We can’t go to school until we’ve expressed our feelings,” Maggie said. “Zee’s calling the principal to tell her that we witnessed what happened right in front of our eyes and we need to talk about it.”

  Lucy was speechless.

  “Do you want to know the details?” Maggie asked. “Or do you care?”

  “Of course,” Lucy said.

  “On his head he fell and blood is coming out of everywhere and it’s very awful.”

  Felix’s face buried in her shoulder, not the sort of boy who had an interest in blood.

  “So are you coming with me to Zee’s house?” Maggie asked. “Or not?”

  “It’s a school day,” Lucy said.

  Maggie turned away, slapping down the stairs, out the door calling, “The Brooklyn Bridge photo with Uncle Reuben crashed,” slamming the front door so the broken shards of glass made a pinging zinging sound.

  Lucy rested her chin on top of Felix’s head.

  “Are we going to the Mallorys’ house with Maggie?” he asked.

  Glancing out of the window, Lucy saw Will Sewall, surrounded by a circle of children, was holding an end of the ladder, lifting it off of August’s body, gesturing to the children to move out of the way. The Sewalls’ unpleasant beagle, normally burrowing in the neighborhood trash, seemed to be licking August’s head but Lucy was too far away to see anything except the dog’s brown and white tail wagging.

  “No, Felix,” she said, shifting Felix, who was getting heavy in her arms. “We’re not going to the Mallorys’ house yet.”

  Nine

  ZEE MALLORY WAS first on the street to see not the fall itself but August under the ladder lying in the avenue two doors down from her house. She was in her bedroom, half dressed, watching her twin sons head down the hill towards school when she saw the ladder just before it crashed to the ground.

  And she ran.

  Down the steps in her short jean skirt, a pajama shell, barefoot, gaudy necklaces slapping against her chest, jumping the last step where Onion was sleeping, over the Tonka trucks and a paint set strewn across the rug and Blue with his purple elephant in his mouth, out the door, into a chilly spring day.

  Kneeling beside August Russ, holding his face in her hands, she whispered:

  “August, do you hear me. It’s Zee. Zelda. It’s me.”

  Blood was spilling everywhere. Zee knew a little about everything, spread wide but thin, nevertheless she knew enough not to move August, to barely touch him until the ambulance arrived.

  “Laney,” she called to Lane Sewall, who was leaning over the railing of her broad front porch with the lunch boxes that Teddy and Maeve had forgotten. “Take the children to my house. I’ll call 911.” />
  Will Sewall had hurried out of the house, zipping up his trousers as he ran, no belt, no shirt, headed towards the children who had gathered around the ladder.

  “Should I lift the ladder off him?” Will asked.

  “The ladder, yes, but don’t touch him,” Zee said. “Just sit with him until the ambulance comes. Lane can take the kids to my kitchen so they don’t have to see the blood.”

  Zee stopped by the Lerners’ house, Josie already in the car off to work.

  “Help Lane out with the kids,” Zee said. “They can’t just stand there watching August die.”

  Josie got out of the car.

  “Is he unconscious?” Josie asked, unflappable.

  But Zee was already heading to her house and the telephone.

  She rushed up the steps, through the front door, over the laundry tossed at the door to the basement, a cereal bowl on the floor of the kitchen, a street hockey stick. She picked up the telephone to dial 911.

  Adam was in the kitchen in his boxers.

  “Busy morning?” he asked.

  Zee turned her back on him.

  “North on Connecticut Avenue almost to the District line,” she instructed the dispatcher. “Then LEFT at Wichita,” she said. “You can’t miss it. He’s in the middle of the street.”

  By the time Zee got back to Will Sewall, the children of the neighborhood still bunched together like nesting birds, she could hear sirens in the distance.

  “I couldn’t get the kids to move,” Will said from the ground, sitting next to August.

  “Any signs?” she mouthed to Will.

  “He’s breathing.”

  “But completely out?”

  He nodded.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Maggie Painter asked, her freckled cheeks pale, her arms tight across her chest. “He doesn’t look so all right.”

  “We have our fingers crossed,” Zee said, running her fingers lightly through Maggie’s hair. “You help take care of everyone, Mags. I’m counting on it.”

  “I will,” Maggie said.

  “They’ll go to my house,” Zee said to Will. “And I’ll follow the ambulance to the hospital.”

  “What about school?” Will asked. “Shouldn’t they go to school?”

  “They need to be together. We have to talk to them,” Zee said. “It’s too much reality for their little minds to take in without our help.”

  AT THE PUBLIC telephone, outside the emergency room, Zee waited for someone to answer her home phone that rang and rang. The answering machine could have been disconnected by the boys. Electricity hounds, those boys, always sniffing around the house for something to connect or disconnect, for sparks to fly.

  Lane answered the second time she called.

  “Everyone’s here,” she said. “I called the school to tell them what had happened and that we’re keeping them here for a while and then the mothers will walk them to school.”

  “Thanks,” Zee said.

  An emergency room nurse stopped at the phone and pointed to Zee’s feet.

  “Shoes are required,” the nurse said.

  “Of course, of course I’m so sorry. I rushed here with a patient.”

  She reached into the enormous bag in which she carried a change of clothes, her makeup, a new line of cosmetics she’d found the last time she’d been to New York called natural for aging girls, a nightgown, Endgame in paperback, a picture of Samuel Beckett she’d torn from the New York Times with the intention of sticking it up on her bulletin board where she kept pinups of dead writers and jazz musicians the way she used to do with six-foot posters of James Dean, tampons, some weed in an old ring box, a birthday present for her father wrapped to send, a mini bottle of Merlot and her ballet slippers which she slipped on her feet while the nurse watched.

  “So who is at the house?” Zee asked.

  “Josie and me and the kids,” Lane said. “I was wondering should we ask Lucy Painter?”

  “Is Maggie there?”

  “She is.”

  “I’ve asked her to help since she and Maeve are a little older, but I never know what to do about Lucy. She’s so distrustful of us. Your call, Laney.”

  Lane hesitated.

  “Maybe I won’t call Lucy.”

  ZEE PUSHED THROUGH the doors of the emergency room and went to the reception desk to ask about August.

  “Trauma is where they’ve taken him,” she said. “But you’ll need to leave your name and wait here.”

  “Zelda Mallory,” Zee said.

  Her mother’s choice Zelda, not a family name like her brothers had been given. But Zelda for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crazy wife.

  “Are you a relative?” the receptionist asked.

  “Mr. Russ doesn’t have relatives in Washington,” Zee said. “I’m his friend. His closest friend,” she added.

  She knew nothing to report except that August’s wife was dead, that he had grown up someplace in New York State and she believed his parents were dead. He had been to the Mallorys’ house for parties but Zee had never been in his house. No one as far as she knew had been inside his house since Anna had died unless it was Lucy Painter.

  She sat down on one of the turquoise plastic chairs in the waiting room, slipped off her shoes, tucked her feet under her so she wouldn’t tap,tap,tap them nervously on the linoleum floor as was her tendency, and thought about Lucy.

  Not that she didn’t like Lucy, Zee told herself, uncomfortable with judgments. She did like her. But Lucy was not easily accessed. Something odd about her, at least, in the way she regarded a person with caution, even a neighbor like Zee Mallory or harmless Lane making chili in the Mallorys’ kitchen at a potluck supper in Lucy’s honor.

  “Zelda Mallory?”

  A doctor, young, short, plump, and balding, was summoning her to the entrance to the emergency room.

  LUCY WAITED UNTIL the sirens disappeared to a thin thread of sound rising from Connecticut Avenue and then she looked out the studio window. The ladder had been moved to the curb along her side of the avenue. A few people, mainly women, were mingling on the sidewalk just beyond a small ragged circle of darkness—surely blood—where his head had landed.

  She dialed Reuben Frank. It was nine and he would be at home, going late into work since he’d been ill. It was safe to call. Elaine would have left already for the office and Nell was at school.

  “Reuben?” Her voice was tentative.

  “Bad timing,” he said in a whisper.

  “Bad timing here too,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “I’ll call back soon as I get downtown.”

  She heard the click of the receiver.

  She opened up her paints, turned on the overhead fan to low, just enough to move the air around the room, and pulled up a stool for Felix, spilling out crayons, taking a stack of paper from the shelf under her work table.

  “I don’t want to make pictures today, Mama,” he said. “I want to be Captain Amazing.”

  “Captain Amazing is on vacation.”

  “Uncle Reuben said he was going to send me a Captain Amazing costume with a red cape. He wrote me that in his letter.”

  “I know,” Lucy said, a flash of anger.

  Reuben had promised a Captain Amazing costume weeks ago, said he would package it and send it.

  “I’ll remind Uncle Reuben when I talk to him today.”

  She leaned over and began to draw, no thought in mind beyond the frame of August falling slow-motion past her studio window—a general sense of rising panic. She reached for a green pastel and a yellow one trying for vermillion.

  It was almost ten, and on the avenue, the women in the neighborhood had probably gathered at Zee’s house with the children, including Maggie, who ought to be in school.

  She would have liked be the kind of woman who could leave the safety of her house and join the neighbors assembling for coffee and intimate conversation, gathering in the wake of a disaster. To be normal with an ordinary childhood and parents abou
t whom nothing remarkable could be said. But she didn’t seem to have the necessary mix to merge into a common stream.

  After her father’s very public disgrace, she removed herself. The mark of shame had worked its way inside her skin.

  “Mama?” Felix had stopped drawing and slipped off the stool where he’d been sitting. “What happened to the Magic Train?”

  The Magic Train had been Reuben’s invention. He would rush in the front door of the apartment on Sullivan Street, less than an hour of free time to spend between the end of the work day and dinner with Elaine and Nell at his own apartment.

  “I’m here, guys,” he’d call in his booming voice. “The Magic Train brought me back to you.”

  Felix was putting the crayons back in the jar, the paper for drawing back on the shelf.

  “Mama?”

  She looked over at him on the floor now, arranging the crayons by colors.

  “I don’t want you to tell me what happened to August Russ.”

  MAGGIE RUMMAGED THROUGH Zee’s fridge for more juice, putting “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on the boom box. Lane Sewall was calling for silence.

  “Children.” Her voice was hushed. “Does anyone have any questions about what happened?”

  “August Russ was on a ladder cleaning out his gutters and fell backwards all the way down to the street and he was squished under the ladder right in front of me,” Maggie said.

  “That is not true,” Zee’s taller twin, Daniel, said. “I happened to see you on your front porch so you couldn’t have exactly seen him.”

  “We were right there,” Luke said. “Me and Daniel just like next to where he fell and Mr. Russ hit so hard we could hear it.”

  “It was terrible,” Sara Robinson said sadly, hanging her small head.

  “I was not on my front porch,” Maggie said. “I was standing almost beside you, Daniel, but as usual you weren’t paying any attention to me standing there so what do you know about where I was.”

  “There was a lot of blood,” Daniel was saying.