Love Love (29 page)

She couldn't watch nature shows where some poor animal got his neck broken by the jaws of a tiger; she averted her eyes at the deer lying on the side of the road with its legs at odd angles. Even dead insects bothered her, Brian the designated sweeper of the upturned shells of the stink bugs and ladybugs from the windowsill.

Judy got up from the toilet and flushed. Snaps rose with her and followed her to the sink, then sat and performed her scratch-and-thump routine, her back leg drumming against the floor. Judy blasted the hot water then turned it down immediately, forgetting that in this modern marvel of a bathroom, the water was instantly hot. She washed her hands and dipped her face to the basin, and as she gave herself to the fluid darkness, she felt a sense of déjà vu. She'd been in this exact position in a bathroom not unlike this, the one in the hospital, on her mother's final night. Of course that bathroom had an antiseptic, industrial quality, but it was as quiet as this one.

As she'd splashed cold water on her face, she'd known with absolute certainty that her mother's death was imminent. It wasn't something she had seen, but felt, a coldness that had descended on her mother's hospital room, the moonlight from the window turned fainter, frayed. To see her own mother die—that was what was waiting for her. To hear her take her last breath, her soul evaporate into nothingness, the dreaded finality of death. Judy walked into a nearby stall and sat on the toilet and stared at the metal olive-green door, as if it held answers.

After what felt like an eternity but was not even fifteen minutes, she dialed Kevin.

He sounded like he'd been asleep, but he forced his voice to clarity. “What's the matter? Is everything all right? Is it Mom?”

“I don't feel good,” she said. Her brother had spent all day here, and the night was supposed to have been her shift.

She told him it was her stomach, that she felt like throwing up. It was an excuse as old as time itself, one she'd used to get out of situations as a child. Certainly Kevin should've sniffed out the bullshit, having heard it himself a thousand times, but perhaps because he'd been half asleep, he fell for it wholeheartedly. When Kevin told her he was on his way, Judy resented him for not offering more resistance.

What she should've done was to tell him the truth when he arrived, but when she saw the concern on his face, all she wanted was to get the hell out of there.

They met outside their mother's room. Kevin was wearing a Penn State T-shirt and a pair of baggy sweatpants. Maybe it was the harsh fluorescent lights of the hospital, but her brother looked old to her, sinewy and weathered like a piece of leather left out in the sun too long. He looked like an athlete beyond his prime.

“I'm all right,” she told him when he harped on her about her stomach issue. “There's just a lot going on, that's all.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding anything but. “Should I call if her condition changes?”

“Of course,” she said, annoyed. “I'm not going into a cave in Afghanistan, just back home, for Christ's sake.”

But when the phone rang that night, she didn't pick up. She'd been in bed, trying to will herself to sleep that wouldn't come, when the simulated electronic ringing shocked her through the surrounding blackness. Brian was working the graveyard shift at the Quick Chek, the vacancy of his side of the bed an unfamiliar void. The apartment was quiet enough that she could hear her brother's broken voice playing on the answering machine in the kitchen.

“I just sat there and watched her,” he said. “She's gone, Judy, our mother's gone.”

And now, in the most luxurious bathroom she'd ever been in, she lifted her face and watched the wetness roll down the concavity of her neck. Rivulets formed like rivers down the front of her body, cresting over the rounded hills of her breasts, rolling down the knoll of her stomach, the final stream pooling in the crater of her belly button.

With her arms propped against the sink, Judy leaned forward toward her mirrored reflection. What was she doing in this oceanfront mansion of Roger's? She was trying. She was trying to make something of herself, yet again. Because she'd almost died, because she and Roger had talked about where to go from where they were, and it wasn't just a physical place, it was purpose, it was meaning. It all sounded so self-absorbed, but she had to stop the
think
and start the
do
.

There was a time in her life when Judy considered herself an artist. Even just remembering this brought on a sense of egoism that she found discomfiting, not to mention horrifying, considering just how little she'd managed to accomplish toward this goal. It was true she wasn't that old yet, but certainly time was running out, as it did for everyone. There were always heartening stories of a schmuck who finally published her first novel at the ripe old age of eighty or an actor finding stardom at the same time he received his Medicare card, but not only were those serious exceptions to the rule, they also were still tales of regret. Because even if they found success late in life, the majority of their lives were spent in struggle and disappointment, those precious years long gone.

Judy never had grand ambitions, just a reasonable-sized one, to make a living using her God-given ability to see what she saw with her eyes and transfer it to paper with accuracy and ownership. As long as she could remember, she knew how to do this. She never even realized it was a gift, which was exactly how a talent like this was supposed to be; the whole point of an inborn ability was to take it for granted, which she did until high school, when her art teacher told her how fortunate she was that she could do something that took people years to learn, if at all.

But in college, there were many precocious talents to rival hers, and when Judy failed to garner one of the five fellowships that the school offered, she began to doubt her future. It certainly didn't help that when she reported the rejection to her parents, her father's response was as curt as it was brutal: “Maybe you good, but not very good.” Growing up, she'd heard two conflicting voices, her father publically criticizing her every move, her mother privately reassuring her that none of it was true. As much as she'd appreciated her mother's support, the words that squeezed her heart were her father's.

But wasn't there a statute of limitations on parental misguidance?
She was two years shy of forty, and she was still blaming her dad. At this point, she'd spent enough time in therapy to be a psychiatrist herself, and if there was a time to break out of her old ways, this was it.

Judy picked up the silk robe hanging from the hook and wrapped it around her, cinching the belt tight against her belly. She grabbed her box of Marlboro Lights on the counter and tiptoed past the bed, where Roger still slept, his cat Momo curled up against the back of his neck like a stole. For two weeks they'd slept together, and so far, it had been a nonexperience. Brian had been a tosser and a turner, broadcasting his presence to her with every shift of the mattress, but Roger's breathing was as shallow as a yogi in deep meditation. Not that she wanted to be woken up by a flailing arm or a kick to her shin, but she wouldn't mind being aware of the person sleeping next to her once in a while.

Maybe this was her true talent, the ability to whine about anything, no matter how ideal or perfect the situation. She was living in a house only a millionaire could afford, and she was still somehow managing to bitch about it.

Two doors down from the master bedroom was the study, where a giant ceiling-to-floor window encased in a thick mahogany frame looked out over Hen Cove and its bevy of sailboats bobbing on the early-morning blue water. She approached the glass drafting table sitting in the middle of the room and sat on the stool, its cold metal surface like a slap on the butt. She tapped a cigarette out of the box and lit it, then watched the smoke curl away.

This was where she was supposed to draw, to do her work, first thing in the morning when her brain was at its clearest. But her mind wasn't empty, it was full of junk as always, what she'd have for breakfast, the silly sitcom they watched last night, and her brother, who called just shy of midnight, forgetting that he was on West Coast time.

“I really can't thank you enough, Judy,” he had said. “Taking care of Snaps and the house and everything for all this time, I'm really glad I can count on you.”

“You bet,” she said, watching Roger teach Snaps how to pray. He'd hold his arm out for Snaps to hang her paw on, then he'd hold a treat underneath so she'd dip her head, and just like that, it looked like the dog was leaning against a pew, talking to God. He caught her staring at them and gave her an exaggerated bow.

“I'm not just saying that,” Kevin said. “I'm really glad you're my sister.”

Hearing the unbridled sincerity in his voice while watching Roger rub Snaps's belly, Judy felt a gush of guilt. Laziness was not the sole reason why she didn't want to tell Kevin all that had happened with her, it was shame, shame for receiving this unplanned gift of food and shelter from a man she barely knew, for the poisonous luck of a rattlesnake's bites. There was only one way to stop this cycle of negativity.

“I'm not at your house,” she said into the phone. “I'm in Cape Cod.”

There was a sizable silence on the line until Kevin spoke again.

“Excuse me?”

She told him everything, about the snake bite, the huge hospital bill, Roger and his money and his house in Pocasset, Massachusetts. During her recounting, Roger came over and planted a kiss on the top of her head. Her admission wasn't just about her, it involved him, too, and even if he didn't feel joy like everyone else, she could see this meant something to him.

Laughter was not a reaction Judy had imagined from her brother.

“Life, sis, is truly weird. You're not gonna believe this,” Kevin said, “but you and I have been leading very similar lives on opposite coasts.”

And now it was his turn to tell her about where he was staying in San Francisco, the woman he'd met (and had obviously slept with, from the way he was playing it down), and his father the porno actor. What was the universe trying to say by having both of them live in the good graces of one percenters?

Now, sitting in front of her sketch pad, taking in the oceanic vista, Judy picked up her charcoal and poised her fingers over the empty whiteness. Earlier in the week she'd tried the obvious, the seascape in front of her, a sailboat, a man and his son walking along the shore, but none of it came out the way she'd wanted it to. There used to be a synchronicity to what was in her brain and what came out on paper, but not anymore. Maybe she'd been away from it too long; it had been years since she last tried to draw anything. She was probably being too tough on herself, something her brother often told her. The first time she tried to hit a tennis serve, she cleared the fence, and when she continued to fail—bouncing the ball before it hit the net, hitting the net, missing long, missing wide—Kevin took her racquet away and made her listen.

“The toss is where it all starts,” he'd said. “If it isn't perfect, then you try to compensate for that imperfection, throwing all that follows off-balance.”

“Are you talking about my life or my serve?”

Ignoring her, Kevin demonstrated again, slowing down his motion, his left arm reaching for the sky, his right arm holding the racquet as if it were a hammer. He could've passed for a Greek warrior, but what was really impressive was how every part of his body was tuned to this pose, all the muscles and ligaments and bones aligned in precise formation.

“Did you hear a word I said?”

“Yes, yes,” Judy said. “Go on, big brother, show me how it's done.”

He instructed her to swing the tossing arm up with the wrist and elbow locked, like a stiff stick, and at the pinnacle of the lift, to open the hand as if it were a flower and let the ball bloom straight and true.

On the pad in front of her, she started with a hand shaped like a sunflower with the long, delicate petals for its fingers. She'd never imagined such a thing, and yet it now felt so real that she was no longer drawing a fabrication but rather tracing an existing model. Instead of using charcoal, she opted for a permanent marker, adjusting its angle against the paper to achieve lines of varying thickness. She widened the stem of the flower and transformed it into a human arm, the transition from plant to mammal seamless. The final touch was the tennis ball, in the middle of its flight, which she'd completed halfway when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“I don't know a thing about art,” Roger said, “but I know that's beautiful.”

He brought her an egg salad sandwich with a half spear of a sour pickle. How did he know what she wanted? He was always paying attention to her, something she wasn't used to receiving from a man in a long time.

When she'd started, the morning sun was still near the horizon, but when she looked out onto Hen Cove, it was nowhere to be found. The boats weren't casting any sizable shadows, which meant it was probably about noon. Three hours, just gone, for all the right reasons.

Roger leaned over to kiss her, and she turned away.

“I haven't brushed my teeth!”

He gave her a peck on the cheek. “Life is good?”

“Yes, it is.”