You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  “You ought to get on the horn to find that brother you mentioned if August is planning to go AWOL on us,” Adam called from the TV room where he stood with a beer watching the evening news. “Otherwise you’re going to be left in a pretty pickle.”

  “I have called him,” Zee said. “Gabriel Russ.”

  “I THOUGHT WE weren’t allowed to talk on the phone at dinner,” Daniel said.

  “You aren’t allowed to talk on the phone.” Adam had come into the kitchen.

  “Shhh,” Zee whispered, her finger to her lips.

  It was Gabriel Russ.

  “Thank god,” Zee said, slipping out of her sweater, tucking her feet underneath her. “I’m so glad you called.”

  She told him the whole story.

  “We are a close neighborhood and August is in the middle of our lives,” she said after she had explained the situation at the hospital.

  She gave him the doctor’s number.

  “Call me anytime and let me know your plans. I could pick you up at the airport.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel Russ said. “Yes, of course and of course. I will be at the airport. I am at the airport.” He giggled and hung up the phone.

  Crazy, she thought to herself, and would have said it aloud were Adam not so quick with his growing unkindness.

  “That was August’s brother,” she said.

  “So it would appear.” Adam leaned backwards in his chair and opened the fridge for another beer. “So his brother’s now in charge and you’re off the hook?”

  “Actually, Adam, at the moment, I am the one in charge.”

  “No question, Zelda,” Adam said, his delivery deadpan. He never raised his voice. “I should have been able to see that in a heartbeat.”

  Daniel finished dinner, pushed his plate away, and asked to be excused.

  “Luke put his spinach in his napkin,” he said, getting up from the table. “So he shouldn’t have dessert.”

  “There’s no dessert for anyone. Not for Luke and not for the boy who told on Luke,” Adam said, getting up. “Someone’s at the front door, Zelda.”

  “Anyway, I don’t like dessert,” Luke said, blowing out the candles which Zee lit every night to diminish the noise level in the kitchen.

  “It’s Maggie Painter at the front door,” Adam called.

  Zee’s spirits rose.

  “I hate Maggie Painter.” Daniel punched Luke on the arm.

  “No hitting, Daniel,” she said abstractly. “No hitting and no hating.”

  Maggie stood in the hall in jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt with a fuzzy black cat on the front.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Zee said, reaching out to hug her. “Come in.”

  “I came to find out about August,” Maggie began. “My mom wants to know.”

  “Your mom sent you?” Zee asked, picking up Onion, who had a habit of running out the front door and up a tree. “As soon as I get the boys to bed, I’m going to head over to the hospital and then I’ll have an answer to August’s condition.”

  “You’re going to what?” Adam called from the television room.

  Zee put her arm around Maggie’s shoulder and led her into the kitchen.

  “I promised you hot chocolate,” she said. “Is it cold enough outside for hot chocolate or would you rather have lemonade?”

  “Just lemonade,” Maggie said, sitting on the kitchen table.

  Luke was still in the kitchen looking in the freezer for ice cream.

  He held up a gallon of Bryers vanilla.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  “Two scoops and make a bowl for your brother and then you guys can have half an hour of television before your baths while I talk to Maggie.”

  Zee took a chair and sat down, resting her chin in her hands.

  “I’m very happy you came to visit,” she said.

  “TV on a school night, Zelda?” Adam called from the den.

  “Just for tonight.”

  She split an ice cream sandwich and handed a half to Maggie.

  “I came over for a reason,” Maggie said, looking just past Zee into the dark of the Mallorys’ backyard.

  “Something serious?”

  She nodded.

  “When I got home from school today, everyone was standing around looking at the blood where August Russ fell,” Maggie began, “and then I went home and I was in the kitchen watching my mother while she was making dinner and I suddenly felt terrible that I told you about my grandfather and how my mother made up her name.”

  “No big deal,” Zee said.

  “It’s a big deal because I lied to you. My mother wasn’t the one who made up our name. My grandmother did that because she liked the name Painter and now she’s dead.”

  “Hmm.” Zee drew her legs under her chin, resting her chin on her knees. “That’s a funny thing to lie about.”

  “I don’t know why,” Maggie said, nervously swinging her legs. “Sometimes I just do things and don’t know why I do them.”

  “Of course,” Zee said almost under her breath. “We all do that kind of thing.”

  “I hope you won’t tell anyone what I said,” Maggie said, pulling her knees. “I mean I know you won’t but I feel miserable.”

  “I understand completely.”

  “And you won’t say anything?”

  “Don’t worry another minute,” Zee said too quickly, knowing she had already told Lane Sewall about the Painters more than an hour ago and was planning to tell Robin and Josie the next morning at coffee.

  She hadn’t exactly broken a trust, Zee thought. She didn’t know it was a secret.

  Zee was terrible with secrets. Over and over, she promised herself to protect the confidences she had been given. And then she failed. Almost immediately she failed. She couldn’t seem to help herself. She wasn’t to be trusted.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” Zee added, wishing to be loyal in the way Josie was loyal or Robin or even Lane.

  “I do trust you,” Maggie said, a shy, cockeyed smile lifting the corner of her lips, happy to be sitting in Zee Mallory’s kitchen in the full light of her attention.

  AT THE WINDOW of her bedroom on the front of the house, Lucy was holding Felix in his pajamas, hot from a bath, watching Maggie standing in the glow of the Mallorys’ porch light, Zee’s arm around her shoulders.

  “Did Maggie tell you she was going to the Mallorys’ house?” she asked.

  Felix shook his head.

  In the large window just to the left of the Mallorys’ door, Adam was standing in front of the television taking off his tie, Daniel or was it Luke doing somersaults on the couch.

  The Mallorys had no sense of privacy, Lucy thought. No shades or curtains, no boundaries between their lives and those of others who lived on Witchita Avenue. There was nothing Zee couldn’t extract from other people.

  Lucy longed for her apartment in New York where everyone on Sullivan Street was a familiar stranger.

  Now Maggie’s head upturned, talking to Zee, hugging her tiny perfect waist—Lucy hated that, hated it—and Maggie left, waving goodbye, swinging around the tree on the Mallorys’ lawn.

  Zee got in her van then, which was parked in front of the house, did a U-turn and headed towards Connecticut Avenue and the hospital.

  ZEE MALLORY WAS Maggie’s third love affair in a series that began when she was seven. First Uncle Reuben, the man she wished to be her father. Uncle Reuben with his curly golden red hair—more red than brown, and bright eyes and dimple in his chin like hers. Then Leo James in fourth grade who wore black-rimmed eyeglasses and straight brown bangs and told her that he loved her. Now Zee/Zelda Mallory, the mother of her dreams.

  She opened the front door quietly, took off her shoes and tiptoed barefoot across the hardwood floor to the kitchen.

  She opened the freezer, searched through the frozen peas and carrots and Saran-wrapped bread her mother made on Saturdays and sausage and chicken and homemade meatloaf. Reaching into the bottom where the
ice cream sandwiches were hidden, she took one from the box, flopped on the couch, her feet on the arms, and thought about Zee.

  On the first page of her social studies text, she wrote in pencil Zelda Mallory. And then, covering the title page in red ink, she wrote sideways, right side up, upside down—Zee, Zee, Zee, Zee, Zee, Zee, Zee.

  Lucy went down the steps to the front hall and through the dining room to the kitchen where Maggie, bent over her social studies homework, did not look up.

  “Maggie?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “What were you doing at the Mallorys’?” Lucy crossed the room, a sense of Maggie’s critical eye as she turned on the burner under the teakettle.

  “I was doing nothing.”

  Maggie put a marker in her social studies book, closed it, dropped the book in her book bag so Lucy wouldn’t have a chance to see Zee’s name written all over in red ink.

  “I needed to talk to Zee Mallory.”

  About what? on the tip of Lucy’s tongue but she didn’t ask.

  “Tea?”

  “No thank you.”

  Lucy poured a cup of tea, turned out the light over the sink, and went upstairs, feeling a weight of sadness and accumulating loss.

  ADAM WAS HALF asleep, sitting up when Zee got back from the hospital.

  “I met August’s brother,” she said. “He arrived just as I was leaving.”

  “What a lucky break for you!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Just nice he has a brother and the brother’s at the hospital now and you can come home and tend to your family.”

  “I tend to my family,” Zee said, slipping out of her jeans and sweater. “The brother’s weird. Something is wrong with him.”

  August’s brother, Gabriel, had arrived just as she was leaving the hospital. She gave him the doctor’s report the neurologist had given to her. The first forty-eight hours after a head injury are the most crucial. He sat next to her, his legs so short they didn’t touch the floor. She reached out and touched his arm while she told him what had happened and how she and August were friends, how he had many friends, especially among the women in the neighborhood. She left her hand on his while she was talking, wanting to reassure him that she had no prejudice whether or not he was brain-damaged or demented or whatever word would be used to suggest limitations besides his size.

  “Do you think August will die?” he asked, looking straight at her.

  “We have our fingers crossed,” she told him.

  “That he will die?”

  “That he will live.”

  As she left, she kissed him on a rubbly cheek.

  “WEIRD?” ADAM ASKED.

  “He is very small and has problems other than size.”

  She took her pajamas off the hook in her closet.

  “Isn’t it strange that their parents named one child August and the other Gabriel?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I’m just making conversation, Adam.”

  “Then you should stick to meaningful conversation. Isn’t that what you’ve been asking for from me?” He turned on the light beside his bed. “Which leads me to Maggie Painter. I can see where that’s going, Zee. You’ve been there before.”

  “What do you mean?” Zee asked, suddenly anxious.

  “You know what I mean. All these little girls. It’s wrecking things. Between us and inside of you.”

  Zee slammed the door and headed barefoot down the hall to Adam’s office where she sometimes worked and sat down on the couch. It was almost midnight and beginning to rain.

  She spread an afghan over her, a pillow behind her back, turned out the light and stared at the ceiling.

  The bedroom door opened and Adam, barefooted, padded down the hall, the heavy smell of beer accompanying him into the study as he shut the door and sat down at the end of the couch where Zee had settled.

  “Mind?” His hand had fallen almost casually against her stomach.

  “Mind what?” Zee replied.

  “Mind that I’ve come in when you’re trying to sleep.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t sleep is what I mean.”

  “What if I say I forgive you,” he asked. “Does that make a difference?”

  “I just wish you’d stop drinking,” she said as she had said so many times before.

  Eleven

  LUCY STRUGGLED OUT of sleep. It was still dark outside, the crescent shadow of a silver moon low in the sky, the only sound coming from a refrigerator that was on the fritz. Something had awakened her, some noise or nightmare that might have had to do with August Russ.

  At first she thought she was in the bedroom of her apartment on Sullivan Street with only one window and that view flat up against the brick building next door and overlooking an alley. Had Reuben been there with her and left before dawn? Had she heard a telephone ringing?

  She sat up, Felix sleeping beside her, his arms tight around the yellow-haired spider monkey Reuben had given him when he was born. Why holding on so tight to the monkey? she wondered. Shouldn’t Felix’s baby arms relax in sleep? Or was he too having a silent nightmare?

  Even in pale darkness she could see the blue shingle on August’s house, the light still on in his second-story bedroom, and she hadn’t noticed that when she went to bed.

  It was August who had awakened her.

  The dream, if it had been a dream, more like a painting before her eyes, the image of August next to her, leaning against her, her body absorbing the weight of him. Dusk and in that smoky light, his eyes were startling blue. More purple really than blue, and at a distance the pupils sparkled the color of a cloudy morning.

  She wondered had she ever dreamed in color before. Or did she only dream in color. She could not remember.

  LUCY CLIMBED OUT of bed, opened her closet door, taking out jeans which she wore rolled up and a white smock with the sleeves loose around her wrists, paint on the smock, mostly green and yellow—her hair gathered in a scrunchie high on her head. This morning she didn’t shower.

  In the bathroom she watched herself in the mirror as she brushed her teeth—a failure to recognize her own reflection which happened to her sometimes, and then she’d stretch out her hands to check if they were the same hands she remembered from the day before.

  August was in the hospital unconscious, no clear prognosis, no sense of the extent of his injuries at least for the next forty-eight hours according to Zelda Mallory, the medical expert.

  It was almost 6 a.m. and Lucy called the hospital.

  “August Russ is my oldest friend,” she told the nurse in the trauma unit who answered the phone. “I would like to be able to see him.”

  There was a long pause. The nurse spoke to someone else and then came back on the phone.

  “The doctor says you may see him,” she said, “but very briefly and best to come this morning.

  FELIX OPENED HIS eyes and stretched, reaching his arms above his head.

  “Are we having waffles for breakfast?” he asked.

  “Waffles and yummy maple syrup.”

  Lucy opened the window beside her bed to check the temperature outside.

  “Waffles?” she asked when Maggie came down for breakfast.

  Maggie didn’t reply. She poured orange juice, took a box of raisins from the shelf, a blueberry muffin from the bread box, slipped her book bag over her shoulder, and left through the front door without saying goodbye.

  Lucy sat down next to Felix, sweeping her index finger through the maple syrup and across her tongue.

  “Was that Uncle Reuben on the phone?” Felix asked.

  “He called this morning from the airport.”

  “TROUBLE,” LUCY HAD said when she answered Reuben’s call. “Maggie has decided to more or less stop speaking to me.”

  She repeated what had happened the night before when Maggie had gone to the Mallorys’ without asking permission.

  “Girls!” Reuben said. “They can be
so impossible. Nell has turned into a complete sourpuss.”

  “Maggie isn’t sour,” Lucy said. “Just silent with me and . . .” she hesitated. “Contemptuous.”

  “Maybe it would help to have someone to talk to besides me, Lucy,” Reuben said.

  “Who would you suggest?”

  “Like a shrink. A child psychologist, someone professional.” He paused. “I’ll pay.”

  “I talk to you because you are the only one who knows my life,” Lucy said.

  “I was thinking of someone who’s objective, which I am not.”

  “In my family, we take care of problems ourselves, as you know,” Lucy said quietly.

  There was a thick scratchy sound coming from his throat or phlegm like choking or was it tears. An intake of breath.

  “Are you smoking?” she asked. “You are smoking and I thought you were recovering from pneumonia.”

  “I am recovered,” he said, and in the distance, she could hear the loudspeaker announcing a flight to Kansas City.

  “I’ve got to dash,” he said.

  Dash! She replaced the receiver.

  FELIX WRAPPED HIS arms around Lucy’s neck.

  “Is Uncle Reuben coming here to see you and me and Maggie?” he asked.

  “Soon,” Lucy said, “but not today. This morning he’s going to Los Angeles for a meeting about books.”

  “I wish he lived with us day and night,” Felix said.

  “That would be nice.”

  “And maybe we can get a kitten,” he said sleepily. “My friend at school just got a yellow kitten with fluff. Maybe Uncle Reuben can bring me one of those when he comes.”

  ACROSS THE STREET, Maggie had stopped at the Sewalls’ house to wait for Maeve, and watching through the window on the front door, Lucy saw the two of them walk up the Mallorys’ front steps, across the lawn along the brick path, up to the porch. But only Maggie walked into the house without even waiting for someone to answer the door, disappearing into a pool of sun shimmering off the glass until all Lucy could see was light.

  Something bilious rose in her throat, a bitter taste from her own body seeping into her mouth.

  If Maggie wanted to change mothers in the middle of her childhood, Lucy wasn’t going to be the one to stop her.