by Robin Black
And then one day I heard from Bill.
I’d been staring out my window watching rain begin to fall when a bell on my computer dinged. And there he was, his name in my inbox like a hallucination.
Dear Augie,
I hope you’re well. And I hope you’re happy. I only just learned from Laine that she’d seen you and told you my recent news. I should have told you myself. I apologize for that. I didn’t know how to handle it, but now I see that I made the wrong call.
As I read, I imagined him writing and deleting, phrasing and rephrasing. Just as I had done, writing Laine on the same topic, those weeks before. Polite. We had always been polite. But we hadn’t always been only polite, and I wondered (how could I not wonder?) what all this calm had required of him.
I know that had the tables been reversed, I would have preferred to hear the news from you. And really, Augie …
Right there. I could feel it, a crack in the sheen.
… I hope things have been good for you. Better than good. I hope everything is just how you want it to be. And thank you as always for being such a friend to Laine. She never stops talking about how wonderful you are and how you saved her life all those years back.
B.
ps She tells me your father is ill. I’m sorry to hear that and hope for the best.
I read it several times. Then I responded right away.
Dear Bill,
It’s really fine that I heard from Laine, and congratulations, of course. I hope this brings you everything you want.
And yes, my father is far into Alzheimer’s. The past is gone, the present bizarre, and I suppose the best to hope for is that the future not drag on too miserably. That sounds glib. I don’t feel glib at all. And I thank you for your good wishes.
A.
Without rereading it, I pushed send. Then sat motionless for quite a time.
Outside, the rain slid over the turning leaves, watery paint drizzling hints of gold and red from the sky. This had been our season. Fall. September into January. Autumn days. A few winter weeks.
I stayed there for some minutes, doing something like checking my own emotional vital signs. Was my heart still in one piece? My mind still able to function? The answers were yes. I was misty, a bit, like the day, but I was okay.
I looked over again at the email, but with perfect timing, my computer set itself to sleep, the screen going black. I started to stand, to walk away, then remembered the old rules, the old ways, and woke it up, deleting the messages we’d exchanged, and then emptying the trash.
In the living room, the painting of the millinery shop caught my eye. Another marker of the end of our affair.
There I had sat, close to paralyzed with gratitude that after a year of mute brushes, silent paints, I was able to do anything at all again. With Bill, I had painted like a madwoman, like a woman possessed. Possessed by him and by the intoxication of secrecy. Secretly in love. Secretly in bed together. Secretly painting to please him. All of it, one magic spell. And then it was gone. All of it.
I’d been so certain that Ida would cast me away had she known what I was really doing there, that she would have been shocked and unsympathetic. But standing in my living room that day, I wondered if I had been right about that. Maybe she wouldn’t have given up on me, she who could turn bits and pieces of fabric into things of exquisite beauty. Maybe she would have known how to quilt the scraps of me together, the edges still frayed and likely to come apart at whatever seams I had hastily sewn.
And I wondered, looking at that sleeve, about my mother. Would she have been the sort to make me feel worse for having transgressed, or the sort to love me harder, to help me through? Would I even have told her? Would we have been that close? I would never know. When you achieve something, a good grade, a new job, you can always tell yourself that the missing parent would have been proud. But what about when you fuck up? Arguably, that was the real test of a relationship, and as far as my mother went, I would never have a clue.
But I had been loved that way in my life. By Owen. Loved and accepted through every stumble, through every fall. I’d once assured Alison that I couldn’t have done the same for him, that I wasn’t as big or as generous a person as he, but standing again before that painting, I wondered if that imbalance was truly something that I should accept.
15
I told Alison about the email from Bill some days later while sitting in my usual spot on her floor, with my usual view of her legs, though with the colder weather she had taken to wearing black tights and long-sleeved shirts layered under those dresses of hers.
“Mostly, it reminded me of how I used to paint for him. How hard it was for me to claim it all back after that, to make it not be about painting to please Bill, and how easy it can still be for me to lose the thread of my own work.”
“Oh, I sometimes wish it were that complicated for me.”
“Don’t wish that.”
“Well, I do. Here I plod along. Reliable. Endlessly reliable. And uninspired. I might as well be making greeting cards. I wish I could paint the way I drive.”
“It might be better if you drove the way you paint. And that isn’t a criticism of your painting. If anything …”
“No. I understand. So, does it feel at all like a chapter closed? Was the email helpful in some way?”
I thought. “Maybe. Something has been. The chapter is closed, for sure. As closed as such chapters ever are.”
Alison’s phone buzzed. “Hold on,” she said. “It’s Nora.” She stepped out from behind the canvas and left the room. When she returned, she was smiling. “She’ll be here in a few days and she’ll stay through Thanksgiving. Oh, she sounds so good.”
“I’m really glad,” I said, trying to seem sincere. I thought of adding that Owen and I never celebrated Thanksgiving, but caught myself before throwing cold water on the moment. “I know how you’ve missed her,” I said. “And worried too.”
“Yes, I have worried plenty,” she said. “But she sounds really good. I try not to pester her about Paul, but she volunteered that things there have been calm. It was all, ‘Oh, you know Dad, he’s not exactly easygoing.’ But she said there had been no incidents, certainly no more drunk driving. I think she may be in charge of the keys. And soon enough she’ll be here. At which point he can drive himself off a bridge for all of me.”
“It looks as though young Nora will be back with us for a while,” I told Owen when he came in at the end of the day. “She’s coming soon. An indefinite stay, at least through Thanksgiving.”
He sat on a kitchen chair, took off his jacket. Then nodded and said, “So I hear.”
“Alison seems happy,” I said. “Doesn’t she?”
But it wasn’t Alison who had told him. “Nora emailed me this morning,” he said.
Such a simple sentence really: Nora emailed me this morning.
“I don’t understand.”
He leaned over and began untying his boots. “I don’t understand what you don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand that Nora emails you her news. I hadn’t realized you were in touch.”
He pulled off one then the other boot before answering. “Oh, you know what young people are like,” he said. “They email everyone. It’s like breathing to them. Meaningless.”
“You hadn’t mentioned it.”
“You never asked.” He looked at me for just a second, then down again to line his boots up against the wall. “Anyway, there was nothing to mention. Until you told me she was coming back—and then there was. Since I already knew. So I mentioned it.”
“When … when did this start?”
“What?”
I looked at him, searching for a challenge on his face, any sign that he was picking a fight; but found nothing exactly like that. “Never mind,” I said. “I just hadn’t realized. And now you won’t have to email anymore, because she’ll be right next door.”
“I guess that’s right,” he said. “I think I’ll go ups
tairs for a bit.” He stood.
“Your water,” I said. “You forgot your glass of water.”
He looked at me for a moment, expressionless, then shrugged and left the room.
“He’s been such a help to her,” Alison said, as we walked the next day. I had brought the conversation around to the subject—pretending to have known all along that they’d been in touch. “I think he may have encouraged her to come back,” she said. “When it’s me advising her, she can’t help but see it as me getting between her and her father. I’m just so grateful for all Owen’s doing for her.”
“I’m just so glad he’s been able to,” I responded, for all the world as though Owen’s attentions to Nora were a gift I had bestowed.
I visited my father soon after that, alone. I felt no interest in bringing Alison, whose failure or maybe refusal to question Nora’s attachment to Owen was irritating me. And meanwhile Owen and I had somehow maneuvered ourselves into a standoff that I suspected neither of us understood or wanted. But there we were. So I didn’t invite Owen, and he didn’t offer to come along.
My dad seemed especially subdued when I arrived, maybe even asleep. I sat for a while taking silent inventory: Bad painting of mine: check. Afghan of mysterious origin: check. Photo of three grimacing girls: check.
The first time I’d seen his new room, during that long-ago week after Labor Day, it was just as I’d imagined it would be, complete with keypad lock on the door, opened for me by an unfamiliar nurse. She’d said there were good reasons for family not to have the code, a statement that immediately put me in a foul mood. The room itself felt both clinically cold and also somehow overstuffed—as if with scratchy wool. A space in which it would be impossible to find comfort but for contradictory reasons. Too empty, too filled. Too cold, too hot. Too small but then also somehow too big, my father rattling inside like a dried seed in a gourd.
I’d visited frequently since then, though he rarely seemed to know me, and I found the visits more and more upsetting. Not only because his disease was progressing, but because he had been mild as a lamb since they’d moved him, and I couldn’t bear that he was there for no reason, eternally punished for a one-time, maybe two-time, offense. At some point, I mentioned this to a nurse who said she’d pass on my concern, but as far as she knew no one ever came back from the lockup wing.
Bars on windows: check. Guard outside the door: check.
And then suddenly my father spoke.
“Gus,” he said. “You were late.”
I was well steeled for his not knowing me, but not for this.
“I’m sorry, Dad. There was traffic.”
“So good with the excuses.” He smiled, glints of saliva at each corner of his mouth. “It’s only five minutes past,” he said. “Don’t look like that. I’m not going to ground you.”
I wasn’t late, of course. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming.
“I’m just glad to be here,” I said. “I like the new place.” He frowned, looked confused. “Maybe it doesn’t feel new to you anymore.”
“No, Gus. Not after, what is it now?” His eyes focused on the distance, his head nodding, regular, small pulses, counting. “It’s thirteen years, Augusta,” he said. “No. It would be strange for it to feel new to me.” His look was familiar now: impatience manifest as extreme, condescending patience at my failure to grasp something obvious.
“I suppose not. After thirteen years. I wasn’t thinking.” And then I asked, “How’s the food?” and he looked at me as though I were crazy. “Never mind. Stupid question. It’s really good to see you, Dad.”
“It’s good to see you too. You look well. Do you know your mother died? I can’t remember if she told you.” He leaned forward a bit. “I’m having some trouble,” he said. “Remembering things. But that’s certainly right. She’s dead. You probably know but I just …” He let the thought trail off.
“I did know. I’m sorry.”
He had mentioned her. My father had mentioned my mother. That fact shuddered through me.
“I thought you should be told.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That was thoughtful of you.”
It was like some sort of natural disaster, the crash of questions I suddenly felt. The ones I had never asked. Questions about my own birth. About her sense of humor. About whether she had nursed me. How she had dressed me. What she had loved in me most.
“Would you like to talk about her?” I asked, carefully, the whole exchange a crystal vessel I might shatter with a too-sudden move.
“Yes,” he said. “I would like to talk about her. Because you see, she was my wife. So yes, please tell me everything. Tell me all about her.” He sat up, like a child waiting for a story.
And I had nothing to say. But there he sat. And there we sat. As the questions inside me drained away.
After some seconds, I found Charlotte’s memories crouching in a dark corner of my mind. “Okay,” I said. “Well, let’s see. She used to love to take her daughters to the park. Where she would push them on the swings, but she would also take turns on the swings by herself. Like a great big kid. And she tucked them in, us in, every night. With kisses. And she was very good at … at cooking. And also she spoke French. Or anyway, there were French songs she would sing sometimes. Songs about sheep. And one about a bird.”
The expectant look remained, but I had run out of material. “And … and she was glad that she had only daughters, that the two of you did, because … because the Vietnam War was going on then, around when we were all born, and she didn’t want her children going off to war. And … and she wasn’t religious, but … well, she liked to take long walks and she loved to … to watch television because her parents hadn’t had a set when she was small. And she … her favorite food was spaghetti. And she liked to drink wine. But not too much. Or maybe a little too much. She would dance sometimes, just around the house, when she’d had a little too much to drink, but she would never dance otherwise. And she would sometimes sing the French songs when she danced. And sometimes hold one of her daughters.” The look on my father’s face had changed, softened. His lids were starting to lower. “And she had a fear of elevators, not of being closed inside but of them going through the earth, of them being unable to stop. And so in elevators she would always hold your hand. And she was very intelligent too. People would forget that sometimes, but she was sharp as a tack and it bothered her just a little that because you were the schoolteacher everyone assumed you were smarter, but she knew that you didn’t think so. And she was also an excellent photographer. Not of people so much, but of buildings, streets. She was never without her Brownie, always looking at things a little askew with her head tilted …”
His eyes were fully closed. “And you loved the way she tilted her head like that.” I could hear him breathe, heavily. “And you never got over it, did you, Dad? You never did move on, did you?” I took my own deep breath. “But you’re moving on now. And I suppose that’s just as well.”
I sat silent, listening as his breathing turned to snores, just a minute or so more.
While I drove home, I thought the world an unsteady, malleable place. What did it matter what had actually happened? My memories of my mother came from Charlotte. And now, my drifting, dwindling father might be reliving them, re-creating this woman, cobbled together of my sister’s desire that her mother be shared and of my own trackless trains of association. He might well be with her on some winding road down which she walked—or danced—while singing in French.
I surprised myself by smiling at the thought. I surprised myself by hoping that they were indeed together, dancing together, as he slept.
16
Alison slammed her car into a deer the night before Nora’s arrival. She was driving back from the grocery store where she’d gone to pick up a few things Nora liked having in the house. My phone rang around ten, right as I was thinking of going to bed. Owen and I were in the living room. She was somewhere on the road. It had just happened. She soun
ded hysterical.
“She isn’t dead,” Alison said. “She’s bleeding. She’s … dying, I think.”
“What about you? Are you okay?”
Owen was watching me, puzzled. I reached for an ever-present pencil, a piece of paper, and sketched a hieroglyph of a car hitting a deer. I wrote Alison, then pushed it across the coffee table toward him.
“I just don’t believe it,” she said.
“Is she hurt?” Owen asked.
“Alison, are you hurt?”
She didn’t think so. She wasn’t sure. She felt off-kilter. The airbags had gone off. The front of the car was crumpled. “And the deer …”
“Has she called 911?”
“Did you call 911?”
She hadn’t. “I just … she’s still alive, I think.”
I wondered if she had been drinking, but couldn’t think of an acceptable way to ask. “It’s just an accident,” I said. “They’re everywhere. Deer. It’s a huge problem. But you should call 911.”
“I should …,” she said again. “I need … I’m so sorry. I just can’t face …”
I asked her where she was and signaled Owen to push the paper back to me, but then I didn’t use it. I knew the place, a nasty patch of winding road. “We’ll be right there,” I said. “Do you want me to report it?”
But she said that she would call. “I wasn’t drinking,” she volunteered. “I was just … I was just driving very fast.”
“You’ve never been in a car with her,” I reminded Owen as we set off—him at the wheel. “It’s terrifying.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be in a car with her anymore.”
“Well, anyone can hit a deer,” I said. “Really anyone could hit a deer.”
The police hadn’t arrived when we got there. Alison’s car was tipped into a ditch at a crook of the road. The lights weren’t on and at first I didn’t see her, but then as we walked toward the car’s front, I could just make out a shape, a shadowy creature, the head of a human, the legs of a beast. Closer, I saw the deer’s face up against Alison’s hip, and closer still saw the animal’s torso, bloody, gashed, ribs exposed, crushed.