“He’s Anna’s. Always was.”
“And I’m always out here hunting for him.”
Cresting the hill, they stopped and looked out over the neighbor’s field, still mostly glazed white. Scrubby tall grass poked through in bald patches where the snow had melted off. They stood for a long time in the quiet. Grasses stuttered with wind, but there was no sound of wind. The sky flat, milky, it looked like it might snow.
“Make her take medicine,” Helen said finally.
“Why should she?” Reuben lifted his arm and pointed east. “Is that Zeus?”
“She’ll listen to you.”
“All I’m trying to do is listen to her now. Come on, Helen, isn’t that what you’ve been telling me to do for years?”
“Not now.”
“You really don’t get it, Helen.”
“What?”
Reuben whistled in three sharp blasts. The sound echoed, bent back across the open field. He put an arm around Helen, and her body gave way against him.
“You don’t understand how impossible it’s been. She puts on a good show for you when you call. Stopping is her choice.”
Helen squirmed out of his hold. “She’s also put on a good show for you.”
They both turned and went back toward the lights of the house.
At the porch steps, Reuben stopped and told Helen what he’d held off telling her. Anna’s wish.
Helen said, “No.”
“You’re going to refuse to lead her memorial? Really, Helen?”
He had no time for this. The memorial was just another thing to check off on his list of shit that had to get done.
“You’re the one who should. She knows it. I know it. You know it.”
Helen grabbed the banister, then yanked back and picked out a splinter spiked in her palm.
“I’m staying outside till I find her damn dog.”
Reuben started up the stairs.
“This porch is a wreck, Reuben. The whole place is falling apart. You really should take care of things.”
Without stopping, without turning to look at Helen, before he slipped inside, Reuben called back, “Don’t make it a big deal. Just do it.”
Helen stood watching her breath. Silver bursts of breath. The whole place is falling apart. She’d sounded like a baby with Reuben. Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. She’d had an impulse to go nastier. To have said the unsayable. You think you know her, Reuben. You think you know every last thing about her. Ask her about that summer. It was her pregnant. Not me.
“Hey, Zeus.” She needed to put that practically feral teacup poodle on Anna’s lap to ward off all the insane New Agers and their deities. Then say to Anna, You’re not dumping out of this life with prayer flags festooning your house and a bunch of people chanting om.
Helen pushed faster through the pines she’d walked in with Reuben, up to the break, and continued beyond the scrub onto the open plain of the neighbor’s land. She stormed through the field. Her body felt fierce. Like she could do anything with it. There were flurries, wet, icy clumps sticking on her face.
More than once when Helen’s own mom was sick, she made Helen promise to speak at her funeral.
“Don’t make it sugary,” her mother warned. “I didn’t have a sentimental life.”
On the morning of the funeral, Helen had taken care dressing. She was twenty-two years old. She knew that was part of what her mother wanted. For her to look good, not as if she’d been up all night carrying on. She belted a navy silk dress she’d slipped from a hanger in her mother’s closet and put on makeup from a drawer in her mother’s bathroom. Correcting the smudge of a penciled lash line, she hated that her mother was right, that her mother knew she’d feel obliged to do it perfectly.
At the podium she found her friends in the back row. They looked terrified. Anna tried to smile encouragingly. But she wasn’t even close. Later Helen imitated for her friends how, on the way to the cemetery, the rabbi had leaned close, whispering, “It’s wrong to say under these circumstances, but I’ve never had anyone manage a room the way you did today. Extraordinary.”
“He’s right. You were.” Anna couldn’t shake the scared look. As if Helen had become someone different. Helen liked that Anna was impressed. Her mom had wanted her lady friends to be jealous of her composed daughter. The truth was, she’d been scared before she stood up. But standing in front of the room, she felt everything recede—her sadness, even her mother.
Now they were all the age her mother had been, and with each year Helen realized how young her mother had been.
The snow was driving hard. No horizon. The field and air dense and white. How would she paint both the seamless flatness and the impression of enclosing expanse? Pissarro’s quiet snow on the road to Versailles, the brushwork visible strokes. Turner’s snowstorm at sea, a turbulent, noisy whirl. Helen’s old friend Arthur Cohen, who painted the Flatiron Building rising up out of the unplowed, snowy New York City streets. Monet’s magpie on a wooden fence, alive with every kind of white. In all of those paintings, there was something—a bird, a woman walking, a horse and cart, the ship, the city building—to mark a boundaryless world of snow. From here there was only field and sky, dark and snow-filled at once. Behind her the line of trees and behind the trees the woods down to the warmly lit house. How to paint the light that filtered up from the house? Helen knew she’d do whatever Anna asked.
Their Kitchen Window
“You’re breaking up.” Caroline heard Danny perfectly well. “You’re breaking up.” He repeated a version of what he’d been saying for the last umpteen minutes.
“I can’t really hear you.” Caroline leaned back in the Adirondack chair. It wasn’t a full-blown lie. There was some static. She heard her own voice repeating. The branches of trees made an icy lattice overhead. The wood pressed damply through her jeans. The damp constricted through her. This grayness was enough for instant seasonal affective disorder. She watched her breath. There was nothing to say. She just didn’t want to hang up and go back inside. She could see him. She knew he was talking to her while standing in their kitchen watching squirrels try to knock over the bird feeders. He was standing on one leg, the other foot scratching up his calf, his own funny yoga pose.
All Caroline wanted was to hear his voice as he repeated, “I’ve got it under control.” She loved the sturdiness of their life. All that time she’d wasted embarrassed for everything she hadn’t achieved. One panic attack and she’d fled the conservatory. Given up trying for a place on the stage. She’d hidden in her parents’ home feeling broken, preparing for her life to become her sister’s. Until she met Danny. And she’d been grateful for a straightforward suburban life. It had taken having children for her to start singing again. It had taken the children getting older for her to go back to college. Now she was considering a master’s in counseling. Danny said with everything she’d learned taking care of Elise—from the hospital system to empathy versus practicality—she could practically run a psych ward.
“Are you still there?” Danny asked. “Have I lost you?” His voice was like bread crumbs on a path leading home.
“No, I’m all too here,” Caroline said. “Tell me something good.”
Seriously
Someone shouted, “Heli, Heli!” and Helen turned, trusting that Anna had run away from all the hubbub to join her in the snowy hush.
It was Layla. She labored across the field, trundling wide-legged in thick, furry boots, crunching heavily through the crusted ice. Then she was buckling into Helen’s arms. Helen felt the trembling beneath layers of puffy down.
Helen tried to remember something about Layla. She and Connie were Anna’s closest friends in the Valley. “My sanity duo,” Anna called them. What had she recently told Helen about Layla? A new business? Something crafty, jewelry? Helen wasn’t certain enough to ask.
“I’m looking for Zeus,” Helen said.
One side of her face was warm from Layla’s crying, the other an icy sting of sleet. Each pelt a microscopic thud.
“Oh, God. He’s been inside the whole time. He always hides out in her closet.”
Always. Helen suddenly winded, betrayed by all the everyday things that Layla knew. She untangled and watched Layla swipe at her face with her jacket sleeve.
“She brags about you, you know,” Layla said when she could speak. “Calls you her star.” Her face was still a runny slick of snot, tears, and snow. “We’ve heard about every museum, every success.”
“I need help, Layla.” How many times was she going to need to ask?
The ice cut at their faces. Neither woman moved.
“I came out here with Anna the first time she lost hair,” Layla said. “It was a perfect spring day. She started with a hairbrush and then her hands. It was everywhere. Clumps of her beautiful hair, tangled through the grasses.”
Helen knew about that day from Anna.
Anna had never said that Layla had been with her in the field.
But now Layla had more. “The black hair against the green grass was brutal. The look of her, with these patchy places. But it was the sound, the sound Anna made, that was—I don’t know how to describe it, Heli. Surreal.”
Heli. There again, Anna’s name for her.
Helen distinctly remembered Anna calling to tell her about her hair. Helen had been in the studio. Trying to meet two gallery deadlines. She kept painting, wearing earbuds. Anna said she’d gone to the field to be all alone. Helen remembered Anna’s insistence. “I went alone to the field behind the house. I had to be alone,” she’d said.
Layla linked her arm with Helen’s. Their nylon jackets scratched wetly.
“I won’t fight her, Helen. I can’t argue that getting sick every year is really a way to keep going. But that doesn’t matter. You’ll see. She’s moved someplace far past us.”
The sleet pelted Helen’s face. Her cheeks bitten, raw.
“But I’m really going to need you, Heli. Anna’s always said you’re a rock. Will you be mine even a little?”
The slope back to the tree line was slick. Helen couldn’t get traction. The soles of her sneakers were useless. Layla angled them up the hill, sidestepping. An arm hinged to keep Helen upright.
“You still think I’m the strong one to count on?” Helen shuffled, braced against Layla. “Maybe you should reconsider.”
Dark Window
“You American girl now. No honor father.” Anna imitated Ming’s father’s syntax. Ming had started the old story about their tripping fiasco and persuaded Anna to take over. The crowd hung on every word. Anna saw how happy her friends were as she talked.
Even with all these friends—more than most people could manage or even want—she’s had a loneliness. She feels it now. It had always been there. Certainly with Reuben, hadn’t there been loneliness? She’d tried not to let her children see the hem of her loneliness, though they sensed it, the twins crawling into her lap holding her face between their baby hands. She tickled them and hid inside that delight. To be so loved and still feel the clutch of that ragged, tampered place. This was her shame. She couldn’t be rid of it. Or wouldn’t be rid of it. She clutched to hold it. This nub that often felt the truest part of her. Those secret hours curled small, shrimped into herself under the familiar blanket.
Maybe, always, that separation, that scratchy husk of loneliness was preparation for this. So she would not be frightened of leaving. She’d been frightened for so many years. And then she wasn’t.
Helen slid open the porch door and, behind her, Layla. They ducked into the room, and Helen pushed the door closed. They were covered in weather. Ice hit the tall windows.
“I was so freaked.” Anna worked to keep her voice bouncy. “I hid in Ming’s room. But the bedspread was alive.”
Her two dear friends, together. That was good. Helen would be less lost with Layla.
Helen’s lips were clenched. Look at me, Helen. Anna tilted her arms to show the wings of the dragonfly. Embroidered animals wandered over the red silk. She fanned her arms to imitate the emerald green dragonflies lifting to ensnare her. Her voice ran scales, glittery and excited, then plummeting gruffly as Ming’s father like an ogre demanded more and more difficult tasks. Ming played along while Anna, in full-on faux Chinese, played the part of Ming’s father commanding she kneel to honor him.
Helen gripped the door handle like she was on the verge of bolting again.
Look at me, Helen. Anna thought, She’s punishing me. And there, again, her loneliness. A shadow that lingered until its presence became a comfort. Until there was less of her outer dark. Helen had been the easy friend, the good girl. She had an optimistic nature. That Helen had her own darkness always surprised Anna. The moody twist in her paintings. And there was Helen’s spiral-down year. Men and drugs. Helen’s recovery. Anna could never square how that was her good Helen.
Finally Helen smiled, and there it was—her friend’s fury. Come to me, Anna thought, not because she needed Helen near to her. Not because there was anything she wanted to tell Helen. Not because she wanted to comfort or make any of this easier for Helen. But because Anna still needed to know she could.
The New Distance
Helen leaned against the door and listened to Anna trill on, entertaining with that stupid high-school tripping story, actually acting out parts.
Layla touched Helen’s back. “Can you believe her?” Layla said and slipped into the room to become part of the rapt audience.
Here was Anna, vivid and clear, a roomful of friends appreciating her every phrase. This is what Anna loves, Helen thought, to be the center. Helen should feel grateful.
All she saw was that they were using Anna up.
Maybe it was worse. More selfish. Maybe she couldn’t bear that it was on Ming and Molly’s watch that Anna revived. So much has happened without her. It was Layla who was there when Anna pulled out her hair. That whatever bright star Helen might be for Anna, she was no real help. Anna had lied to her. Who had Anna really been protecting? It was too late to ask.
This dying was a new distance, unmapped, and Helen felt how far apart they were. Still, she wanted to squish in close and claim her rightful place.
Phone
The mailbox was full. Everyone had a suggestion. A way they’d heard another family managed. They wanted the plan.
Reuben picked up for the kids. Always. Harper was threatening a leave of absence. Andy almost hit a deer on the road this morning. Julian yelled at Reuben. Hung up on him. Called back. “Sorry, Dad.” They couldn’t stand being at the house. They couldn’t stand not being at the house.
Reuben listened.
Took three breaths before he spoke. Four.
Art History 2
Helen turned up the bedroom staircase and stood on the carpeted landing. On the wall was the wedding gift she’d given Anna and Reuben. She remembered it as more promising than the slur of color on paper that she stood in front of now. This was smeary—crimson, scarlet, and ocher. At best it was moody and decorative. Not resonant. Certainly not promising.
That late spring more than twenty-five years ago, when she’d taken Anna and Reuben to the studio, she’d felt—almost in equal measure—that she was already doomed to failure and equally certain of her success. While Anna was getting married and talking about buying houses, she was living for the slim chance of a painting fellowship. More likely Helen would spend another year in the ratty farmhouse with random roommates and dirty plastic sheeting finally untaped and stripped off the windows in May. But Helen had also felt superior to Anna. Anna, her bravest friend, had chosen the obvious, the safe and predictable. Anna might become just any woman in any town with a husband and children and a job that never mattered. In contrast, Helen, the ever-cautious girl, would willingly sacrifice everything to create a singular life.
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br /> That day in the studio, Anna pivoted sharply. “Helen, you’re overthinking. It’s obvious from a mile away. Cut it out. Just give me a painting and say you’re happy for me.”
Of course, Anna proved wild, fiercer always than Helen. There was a question Helen was inevitably asked in interviews or on studio visits. The young women painters asked her how she’d managed forging her life as an artist. She forced herself to say she hadn’t managed that well. She reminded them that her marriage had failed. “I’ve been selfish, and yes, maybe all artists are selfish,” she explained, “but my children suffered.” The young painters laughed and shrugged, saying, “Jesus, who cares about marriage?” Being selfish in the service of art sounded virtuous. They were too young to understand the enduring shame, the endless shuttling of backpacks between homes.
That tension—what was an ordinary life? what was a singular life? what was happiness?—over the years, this became the subject of Helen’s painting. How do you measure the sacrifices or the passions? How to compose the specificity of everyday surprise?
As she stood on the landing listening to the layers of conversation among Anna’s friends, it seemed impossible that she’d ever painted this unpeopled landscape. That it ever held her interest. The wildness was right there, downstairs, when Ming hoped to put another bowl of warm soup into her friend, when Caroline and Anna sang harmony on Joni Mitchell’s “River” and the local carpool friends, the can-I-borrow or can-the-kids-sleep-over friends, begged for another song. Each time Anna was sick, it was these women who rallied, coordinating, around-the-clock company so that Anna had to practically shoo them out when she wanted to nap.
“Of course I’m happy for you,” she’d said to Anna that day years ago. And she was happy. She’d been young, new at balancing all the contradictory feelings within a moment. Was it really so much easier now? Now Helen was getting married. A ridiculous, middle-age extravagance, this hopeful desire. Also entirely ordinary. And Anna would be dead. Would that be the terrible tag after everything from now on—after Anna died? This was part of the unmapped distance. It was what she had never known and now would be part of the crowded canvas. If there was any weight in her paintings, if there was anything original, it was born out of surprise in the congested, jumbled foreground, some measure of confused compassion, this joy and loneliness, these limits of everyday choices.
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