You Are the Love of My Life

by Susan Richards Shreve

  Zee had brought dinner in a wicker laundry basket, chicken Kiev and white beans, thin sliced tomatoes—she passed out brightly colored pottery plates, cloth napkins and forks, opened a bottle of Chablis. They pulled their plastic-covered chairs into a circle, rested their plates on their knees. Zee and Lane and Robin and Victoria and Maggie. Josie had to work late again.

  In the sixth chair, pulled up between Zee and Lane, Gabriel Russ was eating a drumstick.

  “I had no idea August, my brother, had so many friends,” he said. “He always told me Washington was a lonely town.”

  “Except Witchita Hills is not lonely,” Zee said. “Here we all love August.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel agreed, reaching out his glass for seconds on wine. “He is my favorite brother.”

  “You have others?” Zee asked, looking around for the team of doctors who were on night rounds.

  “I have Cicero and Flat but Cicero lives in Vancouver and we never see each other.”

  “And Flat?” Lane asked politely.

  “Flat lives with my mother who is dead because he’s an alcoholic and doesn’t have any control. That’s what my parents have always said. Flat has no control, but I think she wanted him to live with her because she didn’t get along with my father who is also dead. Ours is not a very good family. That’s what my therapist says. I work in a shoe store with smelly feet. Especially the women in their nylons.”

  Zee gave Lane a look which passed to Robin, who was not the kind of woman to continue a public humiliation, even one so minor as that one.

  “What you might not know about August is that he had a wife named Anna,” Gabriel was saying. “And Anna died.”

  “We do know that,” Zee said.

  “Of cancer,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t see her when she had cancer but I came to the funeral in McLean, Virginia. There was a lunch at the country club with Black Forest ham which is my favorite food except for chocolate pudding. Did you go to that lunch?” He addressed his question to Zee.

  “I didn’t know your brother that well then,” Zee said. “So I wasn’t at the lunch.”

  “I didn’t know him either except my mother told us he was the smartest in the family except Flat who ruined his smartness by getting drunk.” He helped himself to another glass of wine. “Be careful, Gabriel,” he told himself in a stage whisper. “August got fired at his job. He wrote me a letter about that and told me how lucky I was to work at a shoe store where I was important to the customers and how I should try very hard not to get fired,” Gabriel said. “I do try and it works. I stack the shelves. Once I got in trouble for eating a box of sugarcoated vitamins which I found in the purse of a customer trying on high heels but they just told me not to do it again and I said I wouldn’t and I haven’t.”

  Zee leaned over, lowering her voice.

  “Do you know why August was fired?”

  “I do,” Gabriel said. “He was fired for sexual intercourse.”

  Maggie giggled. She couldn’t help herself and Gabriel, brushing imaginary lint from his trousers, crinkled his nose and smiled shyly at her.

  “I have never had sexual intercourse before that I remember,” he said to the group in general, looking very pleased with himself.

  “I know the person with whom he had the sexual intercourse,” he said, “but I am not allowed to convey that information to anyone outside of our terrible family. That’s what my therapist says about us. We have a terrible family.”

  THE DOORS ACROSS the waiting room leading to the Shock Trauma unit swung open and four doctors in white coats, masks hanging around their necks, their heads in white caps covering their hair, came through, heading first to the assembled women.

  “Are you here for August Russ?” one doctor asked.

  “We are,” Zee said.

  “All of you?”

  “All of us.”

  “Sisters?”

  “Friends,” Lane said.

  “And August’s brother, Gabriel, whom you’ve met,” Zee added.

  “We actually have two other brothers, Flat and Cicero, but I made them up myself. I am August Russ’s real brother in the flesh,” Gabriel said. “Is he dead?”

  IT WAS JUST almost seven, a late April golden light fading to darkness. Maggie had called Lucy to say she was going to the library with her friend Vivienne Browning and would be home for dinner.

  In her studio with Felix lying on his back listening to a tape of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, Lucy could smell the pot roast in the oven, a slight burnt smell of leathered meat. Maggie was late.

  Lucy didn’t know Vivienne’s family well but she had met them at a school potluck and she knew they lived on Ohio Lane, just behind the playground. There couldn’t be more than one Browning in Witchita Hills and she found the listing in the local phone book under Victor Browning, dialed the number, and he answered after several rings.

  “Mr. Browning?” She sat down, her back to Felix, who was drawing dinosaurs in his art book. “This is Lucy Painter and Maggie is my daughter.”

  “Yes?”

  His response suggested that he didn’t know Maggie.

  “I know your daughter Vivienne. I’ve met her with my own daughter several times.”

  Which wasn’t exactly true. She’d met Vivienne only once besides the potluck dinner and that was on the playground behind Lafayette with a lot of other children.

  “Vivienne and Maggie went to the library this afternoon to do a project for social studies.”

  There was a pause. Mr. Browning cleared his throat. In the background a baby was crying.

  “Vivienne is in the kitchen eating dinner with the rest of us.”

  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” Lucy said, her heart beating hard or was it fast—she couldn’t tell. “Perhaps you could ask Vivienne if she knows where Maggie is.”

  “I’ll ask,” he said, and Lucy could hear the judgment rumbling in the tenor of his voice.

  “Mrs. Painter,” Victor Browning was back on the phone, “Vivienne wasn’t at the library. She’s been at home since school let out.”

  Lucy took a deep breath, her voice trembling, her body cold as ice water.

  “Do you mind asking her about Maggie anyway?”

  Lucy could hear Vivienne in the background.

  “I don’t know,” Vivienne said. “I haven’t seen her since fifth-period math when we walked to our lockers together.”

  “What happened to Maggie?” Felix asked, rolling over on his stomach.

  “Nothing happened, Felix. Just . . .”

  She had to be careful. Felix picked up every scent.

  She reached out her hand and Felix followed her downstairs to the second floor and then the first where she looked out the dining room window, across the street to the Mallorys’ house. Upstairs, the twins seemed to be fighting, and in the background, in Zee and Adam’s bedroom, Adam, shirtless, stood in front of a television.

  She looked up their number in the phone book.

  “Is your father home?” she asked whichever twin broke away from the fight long enough to answer the phone.

  “Somewhere,” he said.

  “Could you get him?”

  She watched Adam cross the bedroom and pick up the phone.

  “Maggie’s with Zee,” he said. “Girls’ night out, dining on chicken in Shock Trauma. You shouldn’t be missing the fun.”

  Heat rose in Lucy’s throat.

  “Zee ought to have asked me if Maggie could go with her,” Lucy said, her face hot. “I’m her mother.”

  She was unaccustomed to her own temper, gliding through difficulties without drama, a quality of character achieved, not necessarily intuitive. Cast into the world of adults early, she had learned to negotiate with a measure of grace.

  “Why Zee?” Adam asked. “Maggie should have asked you.”

  Lucy hung up the phone, took Felix’s small hand in her own and went upstairs.

  “Where did Maggie go?”

  “She went wi
th Zee,” Lucy said, running the bathwater. “You’ll have your bath and then dinner. You and me.”

  “I don’t want to take a bath until Maggie gets home,” Felix said.

  “But you will, sugarplum.”

  Lucy undressed him, added bubble bath, dumped his bath toys into the tub, her eyes smarting.

  He was still in the bath, Lucy on the closed toilet seat, watching without seeing him. How long had he been in the water, she wondered, on his stomach, his skin wrinkling, and then, just as she was struggling to pull her attention back to Felix, Maggie called from downstairs.

  “I’m back.”

  Don’t criticize, Lucy told herself. Not now before she has a chance to offer her own defense.

  “Hi,” she said as Maggie flew by the bathroom door heading to her room.

  “Maggie’s here now,” Felix said, scrambling out of the bath. “Hi, Maggie.”

  “Hi, Felix,” she called back.

  “Can Maggie read me a story?” Felix asked following Lucy into his bedroom.

  “I can’t, Felix,” Maggie said. “I have too much homework.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yup, tomorrow.”

  She sounded confident and disengaged, somewhere beyond Lucy on the way to grown up, leaving her mother behind.

  Lucy sat on the bed reading Winnie-the-Pooh, the words swimming, her eyes flying across the page in some kind of nervous dance, unable to focus. The room was hot but she felt a chill running down her spine, across her shoulders, and she shivered all over as if she might quite literally jump out of her skin.

  “What’s the matter?” Felix asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  “You stop talking. Read the book to me the right way.”

  “I’ll try to read the right way,” she said.

  She read slowly, letting her voice trail off until Felix seemed almost asleep and she got up to turn out his light.

  “I’m not going to sleep now,” he said. “I don’t need to.”

  She kissed him good night, turned on the nightlight, and as she started down the hall towards Maggie’s room, she heard his bare feet on the hardwood floor and felt his body brush her legs.

  “I’m going with you wherever you go,” he said.

  Maggie was lying on her back, her legs against the bedroom wall, the door wide open.

  “Dinner’s in the oven,” Lucy said.

  “I smell it,” Maggie said. “It’s burned and anyway I’ve already eaten.”

  IN HER STUDIO, Lucy leaned over a drawing of Vermillion, trying for just the amount of green to make the sloth surprising, a sloth to take seriously.

  “Maybe you could tell me a story.” Felix climbed on a stool, watching Lucy.

  “Maybe.”

  She was listening for Maggie just in case she decided to cross the street to the Mallorys’ house, hop up the steps to the front porch, walk through the front door, join their family in the kitchen.

  “Do you think Maggie will run away? She told me yesterday she might.”

  “I don’t think she will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know,” Lucy said.

  “Maggie told me you don’t know everything.”

  “That’s true,” Lucy said.

  She was listening as Maggie came up the steps to the studio, her mop of red curls surfacing at the top of the stairs.

  “I was at the hospital in case you were wondering,” Maggie said.

  “I wasn’t actually wondering,” Lucy said. “I knew.”

  “You wouldn’t have allowed me to go if I’d asked.”

  Lucy didn’t look up from her work, careful to choose her words.

  “Right?” Maggie asked.

  She was leaning against the wall, her arms folded across her chest.

  “How come you don’t ask about August and how he is?”

  Lucy put her brush in the green paint, swirled it around and began to paint.

  “August is in a coma. Possibly, he’ll die. That’s what Zee says.”

  Something burned in Lucy’s stomach.

  “Don’t you want to see him?” Maggie asked.

  Lucy hung the green-splattered sloth to dry on a line over the table with clothespins, turned off the overhead light, and picked Felix up.

  “I saw him this morning.”

  “You’re lying,” Maggie said. “Where did you see him?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me?”

  “I am telling you now.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Maggie said, going into her bedroom, closing the door halfway.

  LUCY PUT FELIX under the covers on her bed, kissed him good night, and headed downstairs to lock the front door and turn off the lights. When Lucy came upstairs, the door was wide open to Maggie’s room and she was in her pajamas, sitting up in bed reading. She had on blue flannels, the collar up, a halo of curly hair, and she looked like she had when she was a little girl. But now when she lifted her head, her face darkened in fury.

  How could this have come to be without evident cause, taking Lucy’s breath so she had to lean against the wall for support.

  “If you are planning to tell me I lied to you today about going to the library with Vivienne,” Maggie’s voice was preternaturally calm, “I did lie and I’ll probably do it again because what we do in this family is tell lies.”

  Twelve

  GRAY AND COLD, it was the second Saturday after August had fallen with his ladder onto the avenue, and Adam Mallory was in the bedroom packing.

  Across his side of the queen-size bed, he had spread starched shirts back from the cleaners in boxes, a couple of polo shirts, two pairs of trousers, striped boxers and athletic socks. He stuffed them into a duffel, zipping it shut, and stretched, his arms clasped above his head, his back arched, and Zee, watching from the bathroom door, felt a fleeting rush of desire at the sight of the curve of his back.

  She assumed that Adam knew she was watching him pack but he had made no mention of a trip requiring luggage. Nor had he suggested where he might be going or with whom or for how long, although Zee knew.

  In the bedroom on the third floor, above them, Gabriel Russ was doing what he called my calisthenics—a tiny man jumping rope on a hardwood floor, something which he did every morning since the day he arrived from Albany and moved into the Mallorys’ house.

  “Here for the long haul,” he said when the taxi dropped him with an old-fashioned suitcase almost the size of a steamer trunk.

  “Awfully nice to have you,” Adam had said, the sarcasm barely perceptible and certainly not to Gabriel.

  “Yes, yes,” Gabriel replied, hailing the twins to carry his suitcase up the two flights of stairs. “Especially nice to have me.”

  “One of your very best ideas, Zelda, to invite this engaging gentleman to share our living quarters indefinitely,” Adam had said that night, lying in the dark next to Zee curled facing away from him.

  “Not indefinitely,” she said. “Briefly. I thought he needed a sense of family around him. After all.”

  “After all, we’re a perfect choice,” Adam said.

  “He’s just here until August either comes out of the coma or dies,” Zee said.

  “I was under the impression that he was not going to die,” Adam said. “In fact, that impression came from you.”

  “He might die, is what I said.” Zee turned over on her back. “But probably he won’t.”

  August had improved. He was responding to voices, to touch and to light, but he was still semiconscious with regular seizures, several a day. The neurologists had decided that he should be put in a medically induced coma to give his brain a rest. When the seizures ceased as the medical team hoped would happen, then they’d bring him slowly to consciousness. There was no telling what the ultimate outcome of his fall would be but his recovery so far was reason for some optimism.

  “Do you mind?” Adam asked, walking past Zee into the bathroom. �
�If you move away from the door, I’ll close it so the sound of my urinating won’t offend you.”

  “Are you going to tell me where you’re going today?” she asked, sitting at the end of the bed when he came back out.

  He picked up the duffel, lifted the strap over his shoulder, and headed out of the room.

  “You know where I’m going.”

  It was early and the boys were just getting up, heading sleepily downstairs in their pajamas to watch cartoons.

  “Cartoons?” Adam asked.

  “It’s Saturday,” Luke said.

  Zee followed Adam down the stairs.

  “Are you going to tell the boys?” she asked.

  “Tell them what?”

  “Where you’re going.”

  “Certainly I’m going to tell them, Zee.”

  “But you’re not going to tell them why, right?”

  “Not yet. Not this Saturday at least.”

  Her stomach was in knots, her throat and shoulders cramped, and the carefully constructed defenses necessary for the high-wire act of her marriage to Adam were fraying. She watched him open the fridge and take out a carton of orange juice, put two pieces of wheat bread in the toaster, pour a cup of coffee. She was losing a sense of who Adam was even more than when he first returned from Viet Nam.

  They had made promises to one another and Zee was beginning to think that Adam could betray them.

  “How come you’ve got a suitcase, Dad?” Luke asked, padding barefoot into the kitchen for a banana.

  “I’m going to Vermont.”

  “How come?” Luke asked.

  “I have business in Vermont,” Adam said.

  “How come Mom isn’t going like she used to do?”

  “Not this time, Lukie. This time it’s just me and Route 95 North.”

  Luke got a second banana for Daniel, and headed back to the television.

  Wearily, Zee slipped into a chair. Once a year, occasionally more, they drove to Cavendish together or flew to Burlington, but in the last two years, Adam had gone alone.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked quietly.

  “More to the point, Zelda, why aren’t you doing this with me?”

  She rested her chin on her folded hands and closed her eyes.

  “I can’t,” she said.