You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  “Maybe he was killed,” Maeve said.

  “He wasn’t killed, Maeve,” Lane said quickly. “He was injured.”

  “His eyes were closed tight,” Sara said. “I could see.”

  “Me too,” Maeve said. “His skin looked purple.”

  “Is August Russ dead now?” Maggie asked.

  “We don’t know how August is yet,” Lane said. “We’re here to talk about the accident.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Sara said. “I want to go to school and do my work.”

  IT WAS ALMOST ten when Zee’s Ford economy van flew up the avenue and turned into the driveway. Zee hopped out, throwing her arms around Lane, who was waiting on the front porch and headed to the kitchen.

  “So tell us how he is,” Josie said.

  “Gotta go to school now, chicks,” she said, embracing Josie.

  Zee stopped in the middle of the room and held up both hands, waiting until Lane had come back into the kitchen.

  “Everyone quiet?” she asked.

  The children nodded solemnly.

  “August is alive,” she said.

  As if she were announcing the end of a war, her hands palm out, the fingers spread wide.

  “Now, time for school.”

  The children clapped and cheered, jumped on the kitchen bench, threw their arms around each other, their voices rising to the ceiling. They headed for the front door.

  Zee didn’t stop them. With Maggie in tow, she went through the hall, passing Lane and Josie. Lane fell in step.

  “Zee, if you’ve got some time,” Lane said, “later. I’m home all day.”

  Zee draped her slender arm over Lane’s shoulder.

  “Oh, Laney, today couldn’t be a worse day for time but soon . . .”

  She squeezed Lane’s hand.

  And she was off, swinging Maggie Painter’s hand back and forth, the other children following in higher spirits than the day had promised.

  IN NEW YORK City, Maggie had thought of her mother as beautiful and brave. “Brave” was Uncle Reuben’s description of Lucy.

  “Your mother has the courage of a lioness,” he’d said, and Maggie’s heart swelled with pride.

  No other mother among her friends, even her favorite mothers, could be described as brave, only her mother, Lucy Painter, who had no husband, had never had a husband or boyfriend. Only an Uncle Reuben coming in and out of the apartment, maybe twice a week.

  But after the Painters moved to Washington, Maggie’s image of her mother splintered until there were mornings such as this one after August’s terrible fall, when Maggie liked to pretend Zee Mallory, arriving in her life like a lightning bolt, was her real mother, her flesh and blood.

  She would sit in her bed at night, a book open on her knees, thinking of Zee, pretending she was at the Mallorys’ house, Zee coming up the steps with her jangling necklaces and her bright, breezy smile to kiss her good night.

  “Today is my grandfather’s birthday,” Maggie said as they walked to school. “We always celebrate it even though he’s dead.”

  “That’s lovely,” Zee said. “It’s a wonderful way to keep him alive in your heart.”

  “He’s been dead for a very long time, since my mother was twelve. Isn’t that a little weird?”

  “But very nice to think of him alive even though he isn’t here.”

  Maggie shrugged.

  “We don’t know anything about him. Felix and I don’t even know his real name,” she added.

  “Your mother knows his name.”

  “She calls him Sam or my father.”

  “He was not Sam Painter?”

  Maggie shook her head.

  “Painter is a name my mother made up when she decided to be a painter,” Maggie said, the words out of her mouth, flying through the air, too late to protect her mother.

  Zee leaned over to kiss the top of Maggie’s curly head as they arrived at school.

  “Lucy Painter, the painter. That’s very charming,” she said. “Come over for tea or hot chocolate anytime, Maggie. I miss having a daughter, only these crazy boys.”

  THE PHONE WAS ringing when Zee ran up the front steps but by the time she got in the house to find the chicken carcass from last night’s dinner thrown up by Blue and in the middle of the hall rug, it had stopped ringing. Maybe the hospital, she thought. She grabbed Blue by the collar and let him out in the backyard. The chicken could wait.

  She dialed the hospital emergency room. Yes, it had been the hospital calling, the receptionist said, but no emergency. Mr. Russ’s condition was stable but would Zelda Mallory be able to locate some family member with whom the attending physicians could communicate. Or was she, Ms. Mallory, the one in charge.

  “In charge for now,” Zee said, closing the fridge, getting paper towels from under the sink.

  She cleaned up the chicken on the hall rug and dragged the rug out on the front porch to air, poured cat food in Onion’s empty bowl, let Blue in from the back door, and settled for a moment on the soft white couch in the kitchen, resting her bare feet on Blue’s dependable back, unanticipated tears running down her cheeks.

  MAGGIE SLID INTO her desk in the front of the classroom—half a row between her desk and Miss Beacon’s—and raised her hand asking to be excused.

  “You have just arrived,” Miss Beacon said, “already almost two hours late.”

  “I can’t help it,” Maggie said, standing up, her hand on her desk, feeling faint and woozy. “I’m going to be sick.”

  She was sick. She could faint on the floor of the girls’ room. Surely she was going to throw up.

  She had lied to Zee Mallory about her mother.

  Lucy had not been the one to change their name to Painter. Her grandmother had made that change when they moved to Santa Fe after her grandfather’s death.

  “I’d rather you not tell anyone that we changed our name,” Lucy had said to Maggie. “People take exception to peculiarities like changing your name, which is what some Jews coming to this country did in order to protect themselves from prejudice. Not Uncle Reuben but other Jewish families,” she said. “I think of us as the Painters. That is our name.”

  Maggie had asked Reuben about the Jews since he was Jewish and was, in any case, her source of dependable facts.

  “The Jews were killed by Hitler for being Jewish,” Reuben told her. “Many, many of them died. And some pretended they were not Jewish so they wouldn’t be killed.”

  “Did you change your name?” Maggie asked.

  “My name was always Frank,” Uncle Reuben said. “But I was living here in America and was not in any danger of dying.”

  She asked her mother what her name had been before Painter.

  Later, I’ll tell you, Lucy said. But not now.

  Not now like so many things.

  The door to the girls’ room opened with a long squeak and then Miss Beacon’s voice, “Maggie? Are you here?”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Are you all right?”

  Maggie didn’t reply.

  “The bell’s about to ring. Will you be out of the bathroom in time for math?”

  “I’ll be in math,” Maggie said.

  But she didn’t move. The bell rang. The room filled with chattering girls stopping between classes. Someone pulled on the door to her cubicle.

  “I’m in here,” she said.

  Then the second bell and the girls’ room emptied.

  She unlocked the door to the cubicle, washed her face in the sink, examined it in the mirror, pale against the scattered freckles. A sense of unease. Maybe she was actually getting sick, Maggie thought. Or worse, maybe something was about to happen, some punishment for exposing Lucy, for betraying her only mother, headed in her direction.

  LUCY WAS LEANING over her work table lined with sketches for Vermillion which she had imagined would in one way or another be like her other books about the triumph of the outsider, the disenfranchised, the ridiculed, the cast-off, th
e failure, the shamed.

  Her chin was in her hands and she was staring into the middle distance, almost unaware that the phone was ringing.

  Lucy Painter and the Freaks had been the header in the Book List review of her last picture book, Head First Out of the Ferris Wheel and Over the Yellow Sun, the summer before she left New York.

  The Vermillions on her work table took on a variety of representations—a baby sloth in one drawing, an obese, hairless sloth in another, a sloth with a half-closed eye, a missing leg, but the sloth she could not erase from memory was the dead one hanging by his tail at the zoo.

  That morning when she woke up, Felix curled in the crook of her arm still sleeping, she had a mind’s-eye picture of her sloth, who would be hairy and black with only a little tuft of cotton at the top of his head and that tuft would be vermillion.

  Lucy began a book with an image, drawing on sheets of inexpensive paper, one drawing after the other, the drawings gathering in piles on the table until something began to happen like a love affair, a kind of overwhelming attraction and she would know to choose one picture over all the rest. That moment of knowing when she fell in love was her favorite part of making books. The story came later. But her mind’s image of the sloth at the zoo was too dark a character for a children’s book—she would have to find a way to give him life.

  Her mind was a card catalogue of images giving rise to memory which she sorted through at will and which, after this morning, would include the image of August Russ floating by her window.

  Perhaps August was dead.

  See you later, he had said, and later he had passed her window. Swinging past her as if he were driving the ladder down.

  For weeks, months, she had been working on Vermillion and his story had not materialized—still stuck with the article on the dead sloth at the Brooklyn Zoo. Now she felt as if she were coming untethered, as if discovering the story of Vermillion was the ball of string that would hold her in place and with August’s fall, it was unraveling.

  “Don’t you hear the telephone, Mama?” Felix called, barreling down the steep steps to Lucy’s bedroom. “I bet it’s Uncle Reuben.”

  “It IS Uncle Reuben,” he called from downstairs.

  “I can’t talk,” Lucy said. “Tell him I’m busy.”

  “But you’re not busy,” Felix said, his head cresting the stairs on his way back up to the studio. “You’re not doing anything at all.”

  “I’m thinking,” Lucy said.

  “I’ll tell him that you’re busy thinking,” Felix said.

  The front door opened and Lucy heard “Oh no, glass!” from a woman’s voice—familiar, someone in the neighborhood, certainly one of the women who considered all doors of the houses in Witchita Hills open to them.

  “Lucy?” the woman called. “Are you home?”

  Felix went to the top of the steps, peering down waiting for the visitor to come through his mother’s bedroom and appear at the bottom of the steps.

  “Zee!” he said happily. “We have company, Mommy. It’s Zee.”

  Lucy stiffened.

  “Hello, hello, hello, you little munchkin,” Zee said. “I can’t kiss you because of this.”

  She held out the crushed picture frame with Reuben on the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “I always like a man with a cigarette and this one looks liked John Lennon down to the wire-rimmed glasses,” she said.

  She put the photograph on Lucy’s work table.

  “It’s my Uncle Reuben,” Felix said.

  “I know. Your sister told me,” Zee said, reaching in the pocket of her short skirt, taking out a list. “You know about August?”

  “I know he fell. Maggie told me.”

  “It’s touch and go,” she said.

  “It’s terrible.”

  “You should have seen it.”

  Zee brushed some glass shards from the bottom of her bare foot, shook her hand into the wastebasket.

  “We’re going to have round-the-clock vigilance at the hospital so he isn’t alone if he D-I-E-S,” she spelled it out so Felix couldn’t understand. “If you’d like to be a part of this, just call me. We’re starting right away, tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Thank you,” Lucy said.

  “This must be particularly painful for you since you and August were so close,” Zee said. “I’m very sorry.”

  And she headed down the steps, calling back over her shoulder.

  “I love Maggie,” she said cheerfully. “I want her for my own daughter.”

  Ten

  WHEN MAGGIE CAME home after school the day of August’s accident, Lucy was at the kitchen sink making lasagna. Maggie slid into a chair next to the one where Felix was dipping oatmeal cookies in his milk and dumped her social studies books on the table.

  “The ladder’s been taken away,” she said.

  “I noticed that,” Lucy replied, lining up the noodles on the bottom of a Pyrex dish.

  “And there’s blood where August fell.” She articulated the word for Felix’s benefit. “It’s in a circle and the circle is black.”

  Maggie had seen it on the street, darkening the asphalt, when she and Maeve walked home from school after dance class.

  A small crowd of women had gathered on the sidewalk. Robin Robinson was there with her camera hanging from a strap around her neck and Lane Sewall and Victoria still in her leotard after teaching the dance class at Lafayette and Mrs. Greene who lived next door to August on the other side, a large woman, older but very strong, her arms folded across her ample belly, her thick silver hair in a long braid, her face the color of butcher paper and crinkled, her black eyes set close to her nose.

  “Is August better?” Maggie asked.

  “We have no information about August’s condition,” Mrs. Greene said brusquely. She wasn’t a part of the neighborhood women and Maggie was a little afraid of her.

  “Zee will know.” Lane put her arm around Maeve, pulling her close, nuzzling her face in her daughter’s silky hair.

  “He’s not worse,” Victoria said. “That’s what Zee told me just a minute ago. No worse, no better. Unchanged is what she said.”

  “There was a lot of blood,” Maeve said.

  “The head is like that,” Victoria said. “It bleeds and bleeds and bleeds.”

  Something in the way she repeated bleed, the long e, eeee, the sound of chalk scraping a blackboard, took shape in Maggie’s body.

  She bolted, crossing the street to her house, up the long steps, stopping at the top to check the Mallorys’ house in case Zee happened to be standing on the front porch.

  Lucy had finished assembling the lasagna, set the casserole on the lower rack of the oven, running the back of her hand across her damp forehead.

  “Hot,” she said. “So how was school?”

  “Okay.” Maggie rested her chin in her hand, a creeping unease lingering in her stomach.

  “Do you remember the name of August’s brother?” Lucy asked. “He told us the other day and I have forgotten.”

  “Gabriel, like the angel,” Maggie said. “He works in a shoe store in Albany and August said he’s small enough to be a child.”

  “Now I remember.” Lucy broke the last oatmeal cookie in half and gave half to Maggie. “The hospital needs the name of a family member and Zee called to see if I knew.”

  Lucy had spent the day inside, in the morning in her studio too distracted to work, later wandering aimlessly through the house with Felix at her heels, stopping from time to time to check the place where August had fallen. She watched the ladder as it was carried off the curb by Victoria and her boyfriend, who took it up the steps and around the side of August’s house, resting it against the basement wall.

  While Felix was napping, she stood in the kitchen unconscious of the time—looking at the ladder as if expecting it to materialize into another story of the day. She called Reuben to let him know how close she had been to catastrophe.

  But Reuben was not at work.

 
“Is he at home?” Lucy had asked his assistant.

  “He came in before noon and left, possibly to the doctor’s office for a checkup,” she said. “Or off on a romp with Elaine.”

  A romp with Elaine?

  Ever since she had moved away from the dailiness of her life with Reuben—the coffee shop in the morning, calls whenever he had a minute, evenings at least twice a week—she wondered had she disappeared from his thoughts. Did nights go by when Lucy didn’t cross his mind—propped up next to Elaine in bed reading a manuscript even if they didn’t make love. How was she to know whether her imagined life with Reuben had materialized with Elaine now that Lucy had left New York.

  Elaine Frank, his wife. She had to remind herself.

  Maggie watched her mother making salad, tearing the lettuce, slicing goat cheese, licking off the remaining cheese that clung to her fingers. She seemed suddenly so young with her curly hair in a turquoise scrunchie, a line of green paint from her work on Vermillion across her face, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the stove.

  “I’m not hungry for salad,” Maggie said.

  “Me neither,” Felix said.

  “But you love lasagna, Maggie.”

  “I feel too sick to eat,” she said.

  It was possible that Zee would tell the women in the neighborhood when they met in the street for coffee in the morning or in the evening before the children went to bed.

  Painter is NOT Lucy’s real name, she might say. Maggie tells me that she made it up.

  And the women would wonder what dreadful thing could have happened in Lucy’s family that she would lie about a name.

  The Painters’ family story would be passed on one woman to the next until even strangers as far away as Urbana Road or Cleveland Avenue would be talking about them.

  Maggie pushed her plate of lasagna away, waiting for Lucy to go upstairs with Felix for his bath.

  “You really aren’t eating, are you?” Lucy asked on her way out of the kitchen.

  Maggie shook her head, listening for the sound of bath water running before she left. Then she opened the front door quietly so it didn’t squeak and her mother wouldn’t hear her go.

  A CALL FROM a doctor at the hospital came while Zee was serving dinner to ask had she had any luck locating August’s family.