Black & White (33 page)

Other girls are starting to look at them. Clara stands her ground. Sweat is pouring down her back, but she doesn’t let go.

Finally, Buffy releases the magazine. She lifts her chin slightly. Even though she’s shorter than Clara, she appears to be looking down at her.

“Fine,” she says, with a small, closed smile. “That’s fine. There are millions and millions of others.”

C
LARA SINKS
to the living-room floor, her back against the soft velvet of the sofa. Her favorite spot. How could she have forgotten? The threadbare oriental, worn in the same patches. The bit of missing fringe. She was three years old here. She was four, seven, twelve, sixteen. The space between the sofa and coffee table. Near the fireplace. A haven. A warren. A place to burrow and be safe.

She closes her eyes against the swirling images.
God almighty, Ruth!
Clara hears her father’s voice.
Look outside of yourself for once!
The ghosts of Nate and Ruth of decades past, standing just on the other side of the coffee table. Ruth, her hair sprung from its braid, eyes wild. Her bathrobe hanging halfway open, a breast exposed. Nathan in his navy blue suit—getting ready to leave for the office—afraid to go. Afraid of what might happen.
Promise me.
His voice cracking.
Promise me you’ll leave her alone.

“Here, Mom.” Sam sits down next to her. “Here. You should—”

Clara sees what Sammy is carrying. The fucking book again.

“No, Sam. I don’t want to.”

Jonathan sits down on her other side. She is sandwiched between her husband and her daughter.

“Take a look,” Jonathan says. “There’s something you should see.”

She starts thumbing through the page proofs from the end back toward the beginning. Angry, resentful. Why should she be looking at this? There are no surprises. What could possibly be a surprise? She was there for all the photographs. She had posed for them under bright metered lights. From
Naked at Fourteen
all the way to
Clara with the Lizard.
The narrative of her entire childhood as created by Ruth Dunne. She closes the book. So what? She’ll do the best she can to pretend it just doesn’t exist.

“You missed something,” Sam says.

Her small fingers pry open a page toward the very beginning. The dedication.
To Clara and Robin,
in the center of the page, and then simply the words,
Without whom.

Without whom? Without whom what? Clara’s heart is pounding, skipping beats.

“Excuse me?” Peony appears, as she always seems to do, at the worst possible moment. How does she walk so quietly in those heavy boots?

Clara looks up at her, startled.

“What?”

“I’m worried about Ruth’s breathing,” Peony says. “I think we should call Rochelle.”

Clara checks her watch. “She’s due any minute.”

Jonathan gets up without a word and quickly walks down the hall toward Ruth’s bedroom.

“She’s gasping. She’s having trouble taking in air.” Peony looks stricken. Clara almost feels sorry for her. Almost. Someday, when Peony is a famous photographer herself, she will be interviewed about her time in the household of Ruth Dunne. She will speak with authority, mincing no words.
Her daughters just couldn’t see Ruth for who she really was. Her genius was lost on them.

Clara pulls Sammy close to her. The child is shaking. She shouldn’t be here for this, she shouldn’t be—

“She’s having trouble.” Jonathan comes back into the living room. “It’s true.”

Clara begins to shake herself.

Jonathan sits down next to her, pushing the page proofs aside. He puts his arms around her. She looks up at him—his eyes clear as they have always been.

“Come into the bedroom,” Jonathan says.

S
HE IS FOURTEEN
when she figures out a way to break free of her mother. It begins on a rainy afternoon, after school. A group of girls is walking down Lexington Avenue—their destination a soft-serve ice-cream shop—when one of them suggests that they hop on the subway downtown instead. They aren’t allowed to do this, of course, which only makes the idea that much more appealing.

“Where are we going?” one of them asks. They are so cosseted uptown. Their neighborhood haunts consist of a soda fountain, a deli, and the park benches along the edges of Central Park, where the more rebellious among them smoke cigarettes and sometimes pot.

“I know,” Clara says casually, as they wait for the train under the fluorescent lights of the subway station. Where did the idea come from? It seemed to spring to her mind, fully formed. “I heard about a place where we can get tattoos.”

It was true that she had seen a small tattoo on one of Ruth’s interns—a tiny bird flying above her ankle—and it was also true that Clara had asked the girl who had done it. A guy on Eighth Street, the girl had told her, and then described the building: a brownstone tucked between some taller buildings, a buzzer with no name, a five-story walk-up. Clara took in these facts and tucked them away for months and months in the back of her mind.

“Oh my God, isn’t that illegal? There’s no way can I do that,” one of her Brearley friends says.

“That’s okay,” says Clara. “I will.”

In the tattoo parlor’s waiting area—separated from the room in back by a bright orange curtain—Clara looks over a wall-sized display of designs: birds, flowers, flames, Sanskrit mandalas. It’s more expensive than she thought—two hundred dollars cash—but her friends all help her out, pooling their money. The girls are all hyped up, hysterically giggling, but Clara—Clara is calm as can be, just as she was a few months ago, when she walked into her bathroom at home and hacked her hair into an uneven chin-length bob.
What have you done to yourself?
Ruth shrieked when she saw her.

Soon she will dye her hair jet-black. She will pierce her nose. She will try to gain weight, adding heft to her skinny frame.

“This one.” She points to a delicate winding vine. “We’ll do this around my arm.”

“Maybe you should do something smaller,” one of her friends says.

“No, this is good.”

Her arm. There’s pretty much no way to photograph her without her arm being in the picture. This is what she’s thinking about as she lies down on the cold hard table covered by white tissue paper.
You sure you’re old enough to be doing this?
the guy asks. He knows she’s not—but after all, they’re talking about degrees of breaking the law. As the thin needle pokes her skin a thousand times, like being stung by a swarm of bees, she concentrates on what Ruth will say.

You aren’t my daughter.

I don’t recognize you anymore.

How could you do this to your beautiful body?

Clara focuses on the ceiling of the tattoo parlor. The spot where the incongruously floral wallpaper is peeling away from its seams. The framed safety instructions about washing the area with antibacterial soap.

By the time she is finished, her whole arm is aching and her friends have left, bored and anxious to get home before dark. She walks slowly down Eighth Street toward the subway. Dusk settles around her. The rush-hour crowd streams past. She pictures the vine, its dark green leaves snaking around her bicep. A thing of permanence. A thing that no one—not even Ruth—can take away.

W
HERE IS EVERYBODY?
Clara kneels at the side of the hospital bed, her face inches away from Ruth’s. She finds herself praying, a murmured jumble of words and phrases.
Our father who art in heaven…
then the Hebrew words of the Shema. She’s praying for her mother and she’s praying for herself, her very posture one of supplication.

“I tried Rochelle on her mobile,” says Jonathan. “She must be underground.”

Ruth’s breath rattles. She’s choking—she can’t get enough air—but her face is peaceful, as if her brain has disconnected from her physical self. Or so Clara hopes. The sound is awful, terrifying. Please, somebody get Sammy out of here.

“Jonathan?” Clara jerks her head in Sam’s direction. “Could you—”

“Don’t make me leave,” Sammy says. “Please don’t make me.”

“Robin’s on the way,” Jonathan says. He’s pacing by the foot of Ruth’s bed. His face looks soft, open—vulnerable. He’s frightened, Clara realizes. They’ve been preparing and preparing, as if preparation is possible—as if this is a final exam, a tough test they have to pass. They’ve known Ruth was going to die, but is this it, actually? Is this what dying looks like? Clara has no idea. She reaches for her mother’s hand. Tries to remember everything she’s read: Sontag, Kübler-Ross, Stephen Mitchell.

“It’s okay,” she whispers into Ruth’s ear. “Just let go.”

Just let go.
What a fucking hypocrite she is. Her head feels like it’s going to split open, even as everything around her slows down. Only what is essential remains: breath. A heartbeat. The weak, erratic pulse fluttering beneath Clara’s fingertips.
I have hated you for so many years,
she thinks. And then—like an overlay, a transparency on top of the thought—
and I have loved you.

She lowers the bed’s railing and moves even closer to Ruth. Stroking her papery forehead, etched with fine lines—the skin still warm, the blood still flowing—she runs her fingers along the sides of Ruth’s face. Her touch is maternal; this is how she touched Sammy as a newborn. With wonder, with an elemental disbelief.

“We have to do something!” Peony’s voice, loud, slightly hysterical. She’s lurking just outside the bedroom door.

“There’s nothing to do,” Jonathan says.

But is there? Clara looks wildly around the room. The collection of prescription bottles on the bedside table, the walker, the wheelchair, the commode.
I’m killing her
—she seems to have no control over her thoughts—
it’s my fault she’s dying.

In the far distance, the sound of a door opening and closing. An efficient bustle down the hall.

“What’s going on?” Rochelle asks, moving quickly to take Ruth’s blood pressure, which seems—given the circumstances—beside the point.

“Her breathing,” says Jonathan. “It changed about half an hour ago.”

Rochelle listens, watching Ruth carefully.

“Can’t you help her?”