You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  THE TELEPHONE WAS ringing in the kitchen and Felix picked it up, handing it to his mother.

  “Hi, Lucy, it’s Zee.” Her voice was cheery. “Just to tell you I’m bringing dinner to Shock Trauma at the Hospital Center tonight so I hope you can come. Chicken Kiev. You could bring a bottle of Chablis.”

  In her mind’s eye, beyond the light from the morning sun exploding across the Mallorys’ front door, Lucy could imagine Maggie at the Mallorys’ kitchen table, her face in her fists, the way she always sat in repose, maybe fiddling with her frizzy hair, listening to Zee talk on the telephone to her mother.

  SHE SAT DOWN on the couch next to Felix looking at the pictures in Frog and Toad. Concentrating on pictures to keep at bay a growing sense of desperation.

  Frog and Toad sitting side by side in their predictable arrangement.

  It was possible she could find Reuben before he got on the plane if she called the airport to ask that he be summoned over the loudspeaker: Reuben Frank. Paging Mr. Reuben Frank. Please call home.

  Please come home.

  After the move to Washington, the panic attacks she had had since she went away to college returned slowly like whispers in the back of a room, sufficient to distract her but nothing like they had been when she was younger, when her father died, when her mother was killed, when Reuben had his daughter, Nell, after Maggie was born.

  Nell Frank, she’d scribble on her drawing pad. Elaine Frank. She had never seen Elaine but Reuben had a picture in his office, tall and thin and hawkish, with Nell Frank as a toddler standing beside her, holding the cloth leg of a Raggedy Ann.

  Maggie Painter, she’d write, over and over until the name itself took the form of her daughter. This is my daughter with Reuben Frank, she’d say to herself—imagining his sperm swimming, not in a hurry, bumping against the soft wall of her uterus, into the narrow channel of fallopian tubes, upwards into the center of her being making a baby girl.

  The operator at JFK agreed to page Reuben. Although Lucy didn’t know the name of the airline, the operator told her that American was the next flight that morning going to Los Angeles direct.

  Lucy waited, straddling the arm of the couch, her head against the wall, pattering on to Felix. The operator kept her on hold for the longest time, so long that the tension gradually went out of her. Surely with such a wait, they were locating Reuben. He would rush to the Information desk, pick up the phone, his deep warm voice through the wires. “Lucy.” Comforting the way he said her name. “Are you okay?”

  But just as she was certain they had found him, the operator came on to say that the plane had actually left the gate. Not airborne yet but taxiing down the runway in preparation for takeoff.

  Lucy turned on the tap, filled a glass with water, drinking it slowly, careful not to choke.

  I can’t do Vermillion, she would have told him. My eye for making books has gone.

  She couldn’t find the story. The wastebasket was filled with her attempts.

  ZEE WOKE UP before the sun, the house quiet, the boys sleeping. She went into the bedroom where Adam was, lying on his back, the covers thrown off, naked, his mouth open.

  On the way to the bathroom, she had an urge to slap him. She stopped short, took off her nightgown, put on the slip of a dress she’d worn the night before.

  Onion was sleeping on the bottom of the bed with Blue. They stretched, jumped off without waking Adam, and followed Zee downstairs.

  On the kitchen counter, she had left her to do today list. She let Blue out the kitchen door, fed Onion, put on coffee to brew, and sat down at the table with a pencil.

  Lucy Painter, she wrote in her organized way at the top of a new page in her notebook.

  Questions to Ask:

  1. Name before Painter

  2. Father of children?

  3. Parents?

  4. Who owns the house on Witchita Avenue?

  If Lucy Painter’s real name had been worth changing, there must have been something in Lucy’s life to hide. Zee understood the value of secrets. A person doesn’t keep a secret unless there is something worth concealing.

  She poured a cup of coffee and leaned against the stove, warming her hands around the mug. With spring in the air, a sweet dampness floated through the open window over the sink, a rising sense of possibilities. Nothing specific that Zee could name except Maggie was on her mind.

  In the back of her mind where the darkest of thoughts were corralled, Zee knew that what she wanted was Maggie Painter as her own.

  It was too early in the morning to call the hospital for news of August’s condition. Too early for her family to get up.

  She took a broom out of the closet to sweep up the glass that Adam or one of the boys had broken the night before, always something broken in the house, dishes, glasses, her mother’s antique lamp, trucks without their wheels, stuffed animals gone flat, their stuffing in the trash. She was tired of too many careless boys in her house.

  And as she bent down to collect the shards of glass in a dustpan, a storm cloud must have passed across the pale sun. Darkness seeped into the kitchen and she absorbed it. This happened to her when she least expected it—a drop in barometric pressure, a storm cloud across the sun. She’d be somewhere, maybe alone or surrounded by people, and it would be as if she’d lost her sight. She’d stop what she was doing, take a deep breath, and go on.

  Her mother’s repeated chorus: Whatever happens, she’d say, get up, brush off the dirt, and go on!

  It was not in Zee’s nature to linger in sadness. She’d crowd the day with things to do, her work, long lists of people to call, presents to buy, lives to help, always edging sorrow out of the room.

  She hurried upstairs, grabbed a skirt and sweater, footless tights and flats, changing quickly, took her stash of necklaces, and headed downstairs. She picked up her enormous purse, dropped her to do list in the bag, and was on her way to the front door just as Maggie Painter arrived.

  “I think I left my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird when I came over last night,” Maggie said, a blush of shyness on her cheeks. “It’s in the kitchen, on a chair I think.”

  “My favorite book in the world,” Zee said, waving to Maeve on the porch, holding open the door. “If I ever have another baby, I’ll call him Atticus.”

  THE BOOK WAS lying on a chair where Maggie had left it and she put it in her backpack.

  “Scout is my favorite name,” she said, heading to the front door.

  “My favorite girl’s name is Miranda,” Zee said, speaking quickly and without thought, surprised at her unexpected irritation, her voice sharp in her ear.

  “I’ll see you later,” she called as Maggie went out the front door heading down the steps with Maeve.

  She hadn’t meant to push Maggie away with her temper, but she was in a hurry and bad-humored. The bickering boys, Adam pounding on the floor above the kitchen in his heavy shoes. She was getting a headache.

  She had to finish her notes on Nixon’s Quaker childhood by noon and go to the hospital and then the dentist. She had promised Lane she’d go with her to a follow-up doctor’s appointment at Sibley Hospital. And be back for the twins when they got out of school at three.

  She made a new pot of coffee, wrote a note to her friends who should be arriving as usual and taped it to the glass on the front door.

  Girls of my heart. Door’s open. I’m off for a dentist appointment and then the hospital. Coffee percolating in the kitchen. Honey donuts in the bread box. Strawberries in the fridge and don’t let Onion out the front door. See you at Shock Trauma tonight at 6. Z/Z

  And she ran down the front steps, got in the van, closed the car door and in the side-view mirror she saw Lucy Painter pulling away from the curb, Felix in his car seat in the back. She waved out the window.

  “See you tonight,” she called.

  LUCY DROPPED FELIX off at nursery school and drove across the park to the Washington Hospital Center. Nine o’clock when she arrived. The nurse who answered in Shock
Trauma said she could see August but visits were limited to five minutes.

  “I’ll come for you when five minutes is up,” she said. “We have restrictions particularly with head injuries.”

  She followed the nurse down the corridor, into a large room noisy with monitors, the beds separated by curtains, most of which were open.

  “He’s not conscious,” the nurse said, pulling back the curtain. “I’m sure you know that. But you can talk to him. Perhaps he’ll hear you. There’s evidence that a patient does hear but we never know.”

  “Thank you,” Lucy said. “I will talk to him.”

  August lay in a triangle of pale blue light, some combination of lights in the ceiling and the monitors. His head was bandaged in gauze, wrapped in a high headdress, his eyes covered.

  “To protect his eyes so he isn’t bothered by the light,” the nurse said, closing the curtain around them.

  His arms lay by his side, a sheet pulled up under his armpits, his breathing shallow. He was hooked up everywhere.

  She touched his hand.

  “Hello, August. It’s me, Lucy.”

  She pulled up a chair beside the bed, kneeling in it so she could speak to him close to his face, leaning over his body.

  “I think you can hear me,” she said.

  She noticed his boyish hands freckled with fawn spots—she had not actually noticed that before, all those mornings he had sat at her kitchen table holding his papers talking to her about his book.

  His body was eerily still but the hand over the sheet and by his side was trembling.

  “I’ve been thinking about us. About our friendship,” Lucy said, leaning closer, speaking next to his head, his ears uncovered. “I love our friendship because it’s so accidental and surprising. I’ve never met a man like you—kind of like a child taking the world as you find it without judgment. And then sometimes you’re my mother fixing me lunch and sitting in my kitchen, looking at my drawings of poor Vermillion. My house feels like home when you’re there.”

  She stood up, pushed the chair back against the wall. She could hear the squeak of rubber soles of the nurse coming down the hall to tell her to leave.

  “Nothing since I was a child has felt like home.” She kissed his freckled hand.

  “Time.” The nurse opened the curtain, tapped her on the back.

  She had been thinking she would say I love you to him but she did not. Maybe he could hear her. Maybe he would remember.

  “HE BROKE HIS back as well,” the nurse said, leading Lucy through the doors of Shock Trauma to the elevator. “But it’s the head we’re concerned about.”

  “Of course.”

  “Someone told you that?”

  “They did.”

  “The first forty-eight hours are critical.”

  It was 9:10 on the clock by the elevator. Lucy had been in August’s room for less than five minutes.

  NOON AND DR. Ziegler, the neurologist on August’s case, was late. Zee had been waiting in the lobby outside the Trauma unit for an hour.

  She had seen Gabriel Russ. He was eating a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone and reading a magazine.

  “Are we friends?” he asked, extending the ice cream cone in her direction. “Have a lick. Green is my favorite color.”

  “We are friends but no ice cream, thank you, Gabriel. How is everything?” she asked.

  “Well, well, well but August is bad. That’s what the doctor tells me. Critical means bad and August is critical.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Zee said.

  “Well don’t be afraid because he is bad and so there’s nothing to be afraid of because we know the truth.” He smiled. “My brother, August Russ. Already he is bad, you see?”

  “I do. Of course I see.”

  This seemed to please him and he settled into Newsweek, turning the pages.

  “I saw Dr. Ziegler,” he said, looking up.

  “Good. I’m hoping to see him now.”

  “He has a red mustache with leftover coffee cake on the whiskers. I told him to wash his whiskers. If he washes his face, the coffee cake will disappear, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure it will.”

  “Off his rocker,” as her mother would say, and like her mother, anything outside the ordinary could worry Zee that she might be held accountable.

  “It’s a problem, yes?” Gabriel asked.

  “It’s a problem.”

  Gabriel wandered off down the corridor in the direction of Cardiology and Zee watched him as he walked, a little half step on his right foot as if he were slightly lame but instead he seemed to be taking a dance step.

  “Ms. Mallory,” Dr. Ziegler sat down beside Zee gripping her hand—gripping was the word she used later when she told Lane and Josie.

  Zee slipped her shoes back on, sliding People magazine in which she’d been reading Death Notices into her bag, wondering, should August die, would he be included in the death notices in People since falling two stories with a ladder had the kind of original ring that People was inclined to consider news.

  “We have a problem,” Dr. Ziegler said.

  “With August?”

  “Oh he has problems of course. As I’m sure you’ve been told, it’s a matter of waiting to see what happens. But my concern at the moment is his brother.”

  “Gabriel.”

  “He’s not going to be useful to us,” Dr. Ziegler said.

  “I know. I met him last night.”

  “Can you help?”

  “Count on me,” Zee said.

  “You have my numbers at the hospital and my pager,’” he said. “And I know how to reach you.”

  Zee caught sight of Gabriel out of the corner of her eye as she left, ducking into the ladies’ room to avoid another conversation. He was carrying a large brown teddy bear and humming a familiar tune, maybe from the Beatles, as he went through the doors into Trauma.

  On the way back to the car, her head tumbling off her shoulder with weariness, Zee wondered what might happen to her in the event of an accident. Adam would be her next of kin and how would he react if a call were to come.

  Mr. Mallory, I’m sorry to inform you but your wife . . .

  Would he rush to the car, turn on the engine, thinking . . . my wife . . . or would he find himself quite unexpectedly relieved. An accident, what good news!

  Adam didn’t love her. That realization had come on slowly like her father’s dementia, small losses, here and there, here and there, an argument, a profound sadness, a growing distance. And then the fact of the matter.

  He might not ever love her again—and she was responsible for that at least in part. The responsibility for the rest was, like land run, erosion.

  MAGGIE SAW ZEE at school just after the dismissal bell. She was standing with Lane Sewall outside the second grade classroom to pick up the twins just as Maggie was headed to homeroom to gather her books and papers for the end of the day.

  “Hi, sunshine,” Zee said, giving Maggie a kiss on the top of her head. “I have something for you.”

  She slipped off a silver chain necklace among the ones she always wore and put it over Maggie’s head.

  “I’m making a delicious dinner to take to the hospital tonight,” she said. “Chicken Kiev. Chocolate mousse in little ramekins. I told your mom and I hope she’s coming.”

  “I don’t know if she is.” Maggie was breathless, thrilled and embarrassed, fingering the necklace that fell just between her budding breasts. “Probably not.”

  “Probably not,” Lane said, and it wasn’t unfriendly the way she said it, rather matter-of-fact, a statement of probability, but Maggie took it as criticism.

  A comment about whether Lucy was a willing friend, which she had not shown herself to be, and Maggie was ashamed. It seemed as if her mother were not equal to these women, could not compete in the arena of friendship like they did.

  “Well if Lucy can’t come,” Zee was saying, “why don’t you stop by my house around five-thirty and
come with Lane and Josie and me.”

  “Maybe I will,” Maggie said.

  “Ask your mom,” Zee said. “Tell her that we hope she’ll join us but I know, I really understand, it’s hard with Felix and no one to help her out.”

  No husband, was what Zee meant by no one to help out. No father, no ordinary family life. Something your mother has failed to provide for you.

  That was the way Maggie heard no one to help out.

  Zee was right. There was no one to help out, just Maggie and Felix and Lucy in the house on Witchita Avenue, not even a cat to slink around the house, rubbing its body up against their legs, curled in a living room chair giving off a sound of home.

  Maggie pushed the door into her homeroom, taking her seat, opening the top of her desk where her books and the report on Indians were stacked.

  If she were to ask Lucy’s permission to go to the hospital, her mother would certainly say no. Especially if she were going with Zee.

  She would simply go without asking. She’d call her mother from the public telephone at school, tell her she was going to the library to work on her Indian report, say she was joining a friend just so Lucy wouldn’t be worried thinking of Maggie on Connecticut Avenue at the Chevy Chase Library alone in the early evening.

  And then she’d head the back way to Zee’s house, going through the Mallorys’ yard into the garage.

  Five-thirty. Lucy would be in the kitchen making dinner, Felix drawing dinosaurs with magic marker and art paper on the kitchen table.

  I’m going to the library with my friend Vivienne, was the story she told Lucy when she called from the public telephone at school. I may be home a little late.

  When the clock over the Information desk at the Chevy Chase Library got to five, Maggie packed up her things, crossed Connecticut Avenue, and headed up McKinley to Witchita Hills, taking the back way along Columbus, turning left just above the Mallorys’ house, through their yard to the back door, where Zee was in her jacket ready to leave.

  “Are you coming?” she asked, seeing Maggie. “I’m thrilled.”