Life Drawing (22 page)

“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.

W
hile 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.

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 sounded 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.”

“Y
ou’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.”

T
he 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.

“Alison.”

She turned at the sound of my voice. A rivulet of red ran from her scalp to her jaw. I reached for Owen’s arm. “Call 911.” It seemed obvious she had not.

“She’s trying so hard not to die,” Alison said. “I can’t believe I did this.”

“It happens, Alison. It happens all the time.” Owen had stepped away, but I could hear him giving our location. I sat among the fallen leaves on frozen mud. “Your head. You have a cut. Owen,” I called. “An ambulance. Be sure.”

She started to sob, her face lowered into her hand, so the blood smeared her cheek, her palm. I put my arm around her shoulders. The doe was young, I saw. And seemed to be looking at me. I touched her with my other hand, just behind her ear, so that we, the three of us, made a circuit, complete, a current of life rasping unevenly through. I wanted to encourage the shattered animal to die. I wanted my touch to convey somehow, somehow, that soon the others would arrive, with lights, with efficiency, procedure, protocol. That being alive would be no gift.

Beside me, Alison’s body shook with sobs.

“They’re on their way,” Owen said.

“Maybe she won’t die,” Alison said. I tightened my arm around her.

“It happens all the time,” I said again.

A siren in the distance. Lights flashing at the next bend in the road. I took my gaze from the doe, and while I watched the ambulance approach, the animal died.

The moments, minutes, after that were just as I’d imagined them, except that where there had been a life, there was only the body of a deer, left on the ground while an EMT took charge of Alison. The cut was deeper than I had thought, deeper surely than Alison had known. She might have been concussed as well. There could be internal injuries. She had to go to the hospital for observation. They laid her on a cot, covered her with a sheet that was soon bloodied, small dark patches, spreading. They strapped her down.

“I’m fine on my own,” she said, when I offered to go with her. “I’m suddenly so tired.”

A policeman walked up to us, stern, almost angry. “You women got that close to a dying deer? You’re lucky the animal didn’t kick
your heads right open. Those things are mean as snakes when they know that they’re goners.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Sincere. Like a child who’s crossed the road without looking, and knows that she’s done wrong.

W
e drove home mostly in a silence thick with what wasn’t being said.

“I told her it could happen to anyone,” I finally said. “And it could. But the fact is she drives like a maniac, and that has to raise the odds.”

“That has to raise the odds,” Owen said. “I agree.”

B
y the time Nora arrived the next morning, I had already fetched Alison from the hospital where she’d spent the night, and set her up in our living room—not because she needed much tending, but because it seemed wrong to leave her by herself with memories, with images of the accident. There had been a mild concussion, the doctors thought, and the gash on her head had required twelve stitches. Everything else seemed to be okay, just bruises everywhere, but she was badly shaken. By tacit agreement neither of us mentioned the doe, speaking only of headaches and sore muscles, exhaustion, the sterility of hospitals, the good fortune of her injuries not being worse.

Alison had called Nora and told her what had happened, but still Nora’s face jumped as if electrically shocked, at the sight of her mother on our couch, bandaged and pale. “Oh my God, Mom. Oh my God.” She sat beside her, finding a space on the cushion’s worn edge where no space had been before. Alison’s eyes closed; her lips relaxed into a slight smile. I felt like the intruder I was and left the room.

I
didn’t see much of them over the next few days, and neither did Owen. After Nora and I bundled Alison up to go home, the two of them stayed huddled there together. That was how I pictured them, never apart. I dropped their mail on their porch, and it disappeared. We had our first snowfall, close to half a foot. Owen shoveled our walk, and then did theirs, cleared both cars off, but no one emerged to thank him.

During this period, a new quality of fragility seeped into my understanding of who they were. The car accident had undoubtedly been a turning point for me, Alison’s bravado and daring seeming more like recklessness and desperation now. And as enviable as I found their bond to be—how could I not?—I had a far clearer sense of the shakiness of any ground on which they stood, so when I looked across the glistening white hill, I saw most clearly the shabbiness of the house, the shutters that were askew, the missing porch rails.

And as for the revelation that Owen and Nora had been in touch, that faded from my list of worries. He had used their contact to make me feel bad, a meaningless revenge for Laine’s visit, to which he was arguably entitled. Maybe it had helped him get past his anger to bask in Nora’s adulation a little bit. I could deal with that. Life felt both big and precious during those soft, snowy days. There was room enough for the petty to be seen as exactly that.

I kept to a regular work schedule then, trying not to get too discouraged. It would have been so easy, I often thought, just to cover up the soldiers entirely, transform these canvases into nothing more than a series of portraits of rooms in my house. But I didn’t let myself.

Over time, Alison and Nora emerged and our lives began again to intertwine. Dinners for four. Walks for two—sometimes three,
as Nora occasionally joined her mother and me. More often, though, I would see her heading to the barn.

And those visits to Owen didn’t go unexplained. They weren’t surreptitious. She had admired the space, the churchlike atmosphere—the very quality I had thought only I perceived—and he had told her to feel free to join him. She could read or she could write. She only had to be quiet. The invitation was extended over dinner at our house, this time bread and cheese and ham in the living room, nothing like our first, elaborately prepared meal.

“In the city,” he said, “I always liked to work with other people in the space. It jogged my brain somehow. It’s Gus who can’t bear having anyone around.”