by Dani Shapiro
She still looks a bit puzzled, her head cocked to one side. Clara sees her try to swallow.
“What are they?” Ruth asks.
Zamitsky turns off the light, plunging the films into darkness. They are now blank. The images disappear. As if Ruth can’t be hurt by what she can no longer see. Zamitksy sits on the step leading to the examination table, so he is eye level with Ruth.
“They’re tumors,” he begins. “Very, very small tumors.”
“Small is good,” Ruth says. “Right? I mean, small is better than big?”
Zamitsky sighs. “I wish I could tell you that it matters, in this case. But what we’re seeing here is that your primary cancer in the lung has metastasized to your brain. This is what usually happens, when—”
“Usually!” Ruth coughs from the effort. “I’m not interested in usually, Dr. Zamitsky. What can you do for me?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. How many times a day does he have to do this? How often is he in the position of telling a patient there is no hope—that the illness has progressed beyond the miracle cures of green tea colonics and Mexican mud? And how does he relieve himself of that burden at the end of each day? He must be a marathon runner. Or maybe he smokes a lot of high-grade medical pot. He must have some way of escaping.
“But what about that woman you treated?” Ruth says. “The one who had lung cancer—”
“It was caught earlier.” Zamitsky shakes his head. Clara’s beginning to think he regrets having gone on national television. “She was extremely, unusually lucky.”
Clara sees the fight go out of her mother’s body, almost as if a shadow—the warrior part of Ruth that has served her so well—steps away from Ruth’s physical self and leaves the room. Ruth’s shoulders cave. She slumps down in her wheelchair. Her face falls, aging in an instant.
“That’s it, then,” she says softly.
“There’s a lot we can do to make you comfortable,” says Zamitsky.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
Zamitsky isn’t shying away from this. He hasn’t backed off. He’s looking at Ruth directly, his face no more than a foot from hers. Like a priest in a confessional, he is creating a sacred space, a space where hard things can be said.
“What exactly are you asking?” Zamitsky leans forward.
“How am I going to die?”
“Eventually your brain will stop telling your heart to beat—or it will stop telling your lungs to breathe. Your body will undergo a brief and painless systemic failure,” says Zamitsky. He keeps his tone even. He’s reporting the news.
Clara moves closer to Ruth. She stands behind her and puts her hands on Ruth’s bony shoulders. Rests them there, just like that.
That evening, they gather around Robin’s dining table. Clara would have preferred the impersonal din of a restaurant, the distraction of waiters offering wine lists, busboys depositing baskets of bread, pouring olive oil into small dipping dishes. Instead, there are the children. Two nephews and a niece—strangers to her—who keep staring solemnly at Clara from across the table. They have first names that sound like last names: Harrison and Tucker. The girl is called Elliot. At six, she’s the youngest, but still she sits with perfect posture in her chair—Clara can almost hear Robin say like a little lady—as she lifts her cloth napkin off the table and smooths it across her lap.
Clara has been trying to get to know Robin’s kids. Her third day in New York, she went to a toy store on Lexington Avenue and bought them each gifts she couldn’t really afford—gifts she wouldn’t just go out and buy Sam—video games for Harrison and Tucker, a karaoke machine for Elliot. She has asked them each questions about school, teachers, friends—all the usual stuff that eventually works to get kids talking. But still they continue to look at her with polite disregard. What have they heard about her, over the years?
“You shouldn’t have gone to such trouble, sweetheart,” Ruth says to Robin, as the first course is served by one of the staff. Clara is having a hard time keeping count of just how many people her sister has in her employ.
“Oh, I didn’t,” Robin says airily. “Edjinea is a fabulous cook. She can do anything Brazilian, of course, but she also follows recipes.”
“Delicious,” pronounces Robin’s husband, Ed. The puree of pea soup is garnished with tiny bits of earthy-looking matter that turn out, upon tasting, to be black trumpet mushrooms. A delicacy, out of season.
Clara feels like she’s walked into an alternate version of her life. This is the path not taken. If she hadn’t left home at eighteen, would she have been sitting at this dining table all along? Would she have graduated from Brearley, gone to an Ivy League school, carved out a career for herself in—what? law—like her father and Robin? Not likely. Something in the art world? Impossible, it would have killed her. No. Her job in life has been to survive. And that, she has done. She has done that brilliantly. She’s here, isn’t she? She has a family of her own, doesn’t she? She’s even managing to survive being in the same room as her mother again—something she had never thought possible. Clara realizes that she’s gripping her soupspoon too tightly. When she releases it, her fingers ache.
“Mama, may I please have more soup?”
This from Tucker. The children call their parents Mama and Papa—nothing so common as Mom and Dad for them. Clara can’t imagine what Sam would make of this, these New York City first cousins she has longed to meet. Sam would be intimidated, that’s for sure. Sam is right between the two boys age-wise, but they might as well be creatures from another planet. Handsome kids whose lives are already mapped out for them; the type people refer to as well-rounded. They take after Ed’s side of the family—strapping sandy-haired jocks, destined for Ivy League eating clubs and varsity lacrosse.
Ruth sits at the head of the table, in her wheelchair. She has some color in her cheeks from the two glasses of wine she’s downed since arriving at Robin’s. She fills her glass once again, then raises it and clinks the edge with her salad fork.
“A toast,” she says. She’s looped, Clara realizes. Fine bordeaux and the benzodiazepines Ruth is taking three times a day cannot possibly mix well. “To my beautiful family,” says Ruth, slightly slurring her words. “I can’t possibly tell you how much this means to me—to see you all together.”
Robin and Ed exchange a quick marital look. Ed passes the open bottle of wine down the table, toward Clara. The only thing worse than a terminally ill Ruth would be a drunk terminally ill Ruth.
“Mama, what’s the matter with Grandma?” the little girl, Elliot, asks in a loud whisper. So she isn’t such a grown-up after all.
“Ssshh, darling,” Robin says. Robin looks—despite the yoga, despite the therapy—so tightly wound that she may just uncoil from the table and start spinning around the room like a top. She’s put together perfectly—a personal shopper sends her bags full of each season’s latest Jil Sander, Narcisco Rodriguez, Georgio Armani—but none of the pieces quite fit. She is all angles and absences, a puzzle with the corners done but the center missing.
“That’s all right,” says Ruth. “Elliot, you’ve asked a very good question. Grandma’s going to tell you—”
“Stop!” Robin says. Her tone is so sharp that all three kids snap to attention. “Mother, think for a moment. Just think about what you’re saying.”
The soup dishes have been cleared away, and now a fish stew is being served. The scent of cardomom and a faint whiff of ginger waft up from Clara’s plate.
Ruth continues determinedly. “Grandma’s going to tell you, Elliot, and I want you to remember this forever and ever—”
The little girl’s eyes are huge with wonder.
“Mother, I’m warning you.” Robin’s voice is shaking.
“—that I will always love you,” Ruth says. “Whether I’m in this room with you or someplace else entirely.”
With that, Ruth keeps her eyes downcast, as she uses all the strength in her thin arms to wheel herself backward from the table.
“Mother—Mom, where are you going?” Robin asks.
Ed shakes his head, then spears a shrimp from the fish stew.
“O ye of little faith,” comes Ruth’s voice, faintly. She turns her wheelchair—it must take every ounce of strength she has—and moves slowly through the French doors and into the living room.
“Oh, please.” Robin drops her head into her hands. “What a drama queen.”
“What’s a drama queen?” asks the younger of the two boys.
“Grandma thinks…Oh, never mind.”
“I’ll go see her,” says Ed.
“No.” Clara rises quickly from her chair. “Let me.”
“We need to talk about what happens next,” Robin says. “Clara—”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s deteriorating. She can’t be alone in that apartment with just that girl, what’s her name—”
“Peony,” Clara says. “And we can talk about it later.” She’s feeling something almost impossible to contain, a welling up of sympathy for her mother so huge that it seems to fill her, spilling from her very pores.
Ruth has moved to the far side of the living room, her wheelchair parked beneath a large lime-green vintage poster of a devil wrapped around a Tanqueray bottle. In the polished surroundings of Robin’s living room, with its white art-deco sofas and Regency chairs, yards and yards of shimming silk curtains spilling artfully to the floor, Ruth looks small and lost.
“Mom.” Clara walks over to her. “Robin didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
Ruth shakes her head. Her chin is trembling.
“She was just trying to protect the kids,” Clara goes on. The wrong thing to say, judging from the way Ruth sinks deeper into her wheelchair.
“Please. All Robin’s done for the past ten years is try to protect those children from me.” Ruth pauses, takes a ragged breath. “As if I’m some kind of monster.”
“Well, you can see that they don’t feel that way about you—you’re their grandmother,” Clara says, blindly trying to soothe. What is she saying? So hypocritical. Sam’s face floats before her. Eyes accusing, mouth trembling with confusion.
“Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day,” Ruth says bitterly. “That’s exactly how many times a year I see them. At parties—surrounded by hundreds of people.”
Clara is just hoping the tide doesn’t turn toward her now. And what about you? You left me—for all these years.
“This is too hard,” says Ruth. “I want to go home.”
“Nonsense,” says Robin, startling them both. Clara hadn’t heard her approaching, in her soft velvet slippers. “We’re about to have dessert.”
Ruth just keeps staring at some invisible point in space, as if she sees something in the air in front of her. A vision, a ghost. The color has drained from her cheeks, the wine-induced euphoria gone in an instant.
“Look, Robin. I can take Mom back to her apartment,” Clara says. “If that’s what she wants.”
A long-forgotten familiar look crosses Robin’s face. Ah, she sees. Clara is here now. Clara, who will fulfill her role as the favorite daughter and do her mother’s bidding.
“I guess I thought—” Ruth begins. Then she stops, squeezes her eyes shut, summoning the words. She tries again. “I don’t have much time left to see you all—to make sense of you.”
“What exactly did the doctor say?” asks Robin, ever practical.
“I wanted to be able to fix you in my mind,” continues Ruth. Her voice gets softer and softer until it’s almost an echo of itself. “So I can take you with me when I go. Like those carvings they find on the insides of caves, those carved figures that have been there for thousands of years—”
“What are you saying?” asks Robin. She sounds just like she did when she was five years old. Mommy, you’re not making any sense.
Clara’s breath catches. It all makes sense to her, of course. She has always understood. Ruth lives for the images in her mind—she has never been able to live for anything else. For a long time, Clara was that image. And during those darkest, most golden years, her mother lived for her.
“Mama?” Elliot’s voice, calling from the dining room. “The ice cream’s melting!”
“Coming, sweetheart,” Robin calls over her shoulder. She turns to her mother. “Please. This isn’t easy for any of us. Let’s try again.”
Ruth nods, almost imperceptibly. And the three of them—the Dunne women—go slowly back to the table.
Chapter Four
RUTH’S APARTMENT is abuzz with activity, just as it has always been—but now, instead of assistants and interns, ringing phones, and FedEx deliveries, there is a revolving door of home aides. Clara has hired them through an agency—despite Ruth’s feeble protests that she can manage just fine. In the past two and a half weeks, there have already been a series of them: women exhausted by jobs that usually come to an end when the person they are caring for dies.
She’s too difficult, one of them said, before she quit on her second day.
Nobody talks to me like that, said another.
A package of adult diapers leans against the wall beneath the Edward Weston. The line of amber plastic bottles along the kitchen counter—morphine, Lorazepam, Prozac (Prozac? What possible point can there be in Ruth taking Prozac?)—offers Clara the comforting thought that if it all becomes too much, she can numb herself with one of Ruth’s sedatives. At least for a few hours, she can medicate herself into a semblance of peace.
This morning’s call home ended badly. Each day, Sammy has grown ever so slightly less communicative. How’s school? Fine. What’s new? Nothing. Jonathan took the phone from Sam, then sent her upstairs to get her socks and shoes on. He whispered fiercely into the phone, his voice a hiss.
“You’re putting me in an impossible position.”
“I know.” Clara had closed her eyes. “Believe me, I—”
“And I’ve got to tell you, I really resent it.”
“Please, Jonathan. Don’t say that. It makes me feel—”
“This is bullshit, Clara. You’re in total control of this situation—in fact, that’s part of the problem. You’re acting like a control freak. You’re telling me what I can and can’t tell Sammy. You’re forcing me to lie to her.”
“No, I’m not, I—”
He barreled right over her, interrupting—something he almost never did.
“I can’t keep doing this.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that something’s got to give. Either come home now or let me tell Sam why you’re away.”
“No!”
“Will you stop it already?”
She could picture Jonathan—the look on his face—one she had seen only a few times in their years together. He rarely got angry, but when he did it transformed him. His handsome, craggy face became at once hard and vulnerable. She couldn’t bear the thought of it.
“Please, Jon—”
“No. It’s enough.” His voice was devoid of all sympathy for her. “I’m hanging up now.”
Peony has just come into the kitchen. She’s carrying a batch of photographs encased in large manila folders—back to being the photography intern she was meant to be.
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you were in here!” she says. “I was just going to make myself a fruit smoothie. Do you want one?”
“No, thanks,” Clara says. The girl is always apologizing.
Peony’s wearing three tank tops, one layered over the next over the next. White, gray, black. A red grease pencil is stuck behind her ear and she smells familiar, slightly musty—she’s been in the archives, Clara realizes. A photograph is peeking from the top of the folders, revealing the top of a shiny dark head, a slice of white forehead. Without even knowing what she’s seeing—a fraction of an image, taken out of context, it could be anything, couldn’t it?—Clara draws in her breath.
“What are those…Why are you…?” she stammers.
“Oh,
these?” Peony hugs the folders to her chest, gently caressing them. “Ruth wanted to edit them this afternoon. She’s not getting out of bed much now, and—you know. For the book?”
“The book?” Clara repeats.
A dark-skinned woman in a purple satin blouse, several lengths of gold chain wrapped around her neck, bustles down the hallway.
“Good morning, Rochelle,” Clara says. The hospice nurse, arranged for by Dr. Zamitsky’s office. A real pro—and, unlike the home aides, no behavior of Ruth’s is going to faze her.
“Your mother’s resting comfortably,” says Rochelle. “No changes. I’ll stop back in a few days.”
A few days? What does she mean, a few days? And what’s this about a book? Clara’s head hurts. She can’t make sense of anything and finds herself suddenly, improbably, wishing that Robin were here. Robin would know what to do. She would break each thing down into small manageable bits.
“She’s great, the hospice nurse,” Peony says, after Rochelle leaves. “I don’t know how these people do it, going from apartment to apartment where everybody they take care of is—”
She stops abruptly.
“It’s okay, Peony. You can use the D word,” says Clara. She’s still staring at the corner of the photograph, the slice of white skin, the shiny dark hair.
Peony looks at her blankly.
“Dying,” says Clara. “I know my mother is dying.”
Peony ducks her head to the side, the color rising in her cheeks. Clara has a flash of sympathy for the girl. Of all the well-known photographers in New York, of all the studios where she might have picked up a few tips, maybe found herself a mentor, she had to wind up here—in the house of craziness and death.
Down the long hall leading to the bedroom wing, Clara hears a door creak open, then shut with a solid click. Ruth’s door. A childhood sound, the sound of her mother, restless, tiptoeing past Clara and Robin’s bedroom in the middle of the night. Back then, Ruth would wander into the kitchen, fix herself a cup of tea, then pad quietly into the studio. There were so many closed doors between Ruth and her daughters—her bedroom door and theirs, the studio door, the darkroom—each one another kind of barrier. Where’s Mommy? Let’s go and find Mommy. Ruth was always, finally, in the darkroom, blue light seeping from beneath the crack. Don’t open it! Ruth’s sharp voice. They knew she didn’t mean to sound angry. Ssshhh, Mommy’s working, they whispered, holding hands as they made their way back to their rooms.