Painting Naked (Macmillan New Writing)

by Maggie Dana

  Shoving the phone in my pocket, I step onto the front porch and watch my sons load Alistair’s car with loot—two boxes of pies, a cooler full of leftover turkey, cranberry jelly, and stuffing, the remains of a sweet potato casserole, and the gifts I gave them. Nothing extravagant this year, just underwear and shirts, leather work gloves for Alistair and a set of sheets for Jordan.

  He’s wearing mismatched socks and faded blue sweatpants with pockets that stick out like puppies’ ears. I resist the urge to tuck them back in, the same way I no longer move glasses of milk away from his elbow at mealtimes or remind him to brush his teeth.

  I settle for hugs instead. Jordan gathers me up and it’s like being embraced by a sheep dog and I’m reminded of the time he was sixteen and playing bass guitar. His group performed at a high school dance and he invited me to come and watch. I slipped in the side door, late, and stood in the shadows, but Jordan spotted me, beckoned me onto the stage and hugged me.

  Right there. In front of his peers.

  Alistair shoves his brother to one side and squeezes me so hard he puts my ribs at risk. I feel the solid muscles of his arms, the strength that comes from digging up rocks and swimming the butterfly for his college’s swim team. No wonder his shoulders are twice the width of mine. Last year he qualified for the intercollegiate finals and won, but Alistair couldn’t care less about that. Swimming provides him with a scholarship, but that’s all. He’s more interested in fossils than gold medals.

  Two parrots fly over. I’ll miss those birds when I move.

  My sons climb into Alistair’s old Saab, and I wave till they’re out of sight, bumping down my dirt road the way they did on their bicycles years ago, pretending to be Evel Knievel. Once, I caught them setting up ramps and I watched, horrified, as Alistair roared up the plywood on his bike and leaped over a trash can with Jordan lying inside it. Memories like this make me wish I’d had a brother or a sister.

  Sophie.

  I pull the phone from my pocket. “Sophie, I’m sorry, but—”

  Silence. Have we been cut off? Is Sophie pissed because I put her on hold? I hear a sniff, someone crying.

  “Sophie?”

  “Jill, it’s Mum. Can you come over?”

  Chapter 40

  Sands Point

  December 2011

  Between them, Lizzie and Tom haul me through the next twenty-four hours. Tom calls the airline and books my ticket with the one credit card I have left that isn’t maxed out. Then he tells me to go and find my passport and not to worry about the mail. He’ll phone me at Sophie’s if anything looks urgent.

  Threatening letters?

  Men in black with buzz cuts and bicycle chains?

  Lizzie rummages through my closet with the zeal of a bargain hunter in Filene’s Basement. She tosses skirts, pants, and sweaters on the bed, resurrects my black linen dress with the scoop neck and short sleeves.

  “That’s for summer,” I say.

  She folds it with tissue paper and lays it in my suitcase. “It’s the only black dress you own.”

  Please God, I won’t need it, will I?

  Lizzie adds my black blazer to the mix. A black and tan paisley shawl, black shoes. “Will you have to wear a hat?” she says.

  “Christ, Lizzie! Claudia’s in the ICU, not a fucking funeral home.”

  She puts a hand on my arm. “I’m trying to be practical.”

  “I don’t give a shit about clothes.” I glare at the phone. “Why don’t they call?”

  “Because hospitals don’t allow cell phones and because no news is good news,” Lizzie says. “Now go downstairs and do something useful like polishing your doorknobs. I’ll take care of things up here.”

  “What about my other stuff?” I wave toward the bathroom. “Toothbrush, shampoo. Make-up.” Dear God, I’m worried about lipstick and mascara at a time like this?

  Lizzie holds up my cosmetics bag. “All taken care of.”

  The front door bangs open and I hear Harriet calling out. She’s here with Anna to collect Zachary. I pull my reluctant cat from beneath the couch and try to coax him into his carrier. He arches his back, braces his paws against the frame, and acts like a terrified skydiver about to be pushed from an airplane. I wait for him to relax his grip, then shove him inside. Taking care not to pinch his tail in the lid, I snap it shut and follow Harriet outside. We fill the trunk of her car with Zachary’s litter box and cat food, his dishes and Lizzie’s straw hat, and I wonder what state of mind I’ll be in the next time I see him.

  Myocardial infarction.

  That’s what Sophie called it. Her tongue tripped on the words, but she finally got them out. Maybe it’s easier than saying heart attack, less threatening because it sounds foreign. Rude, almost, as if the heart merely farted rather than stopped.

  “Jill,” Harriet says. “Give me Sophie’s phone and fax numbers in London, and can you access your e-mail from there?”

  I look at her, bewildered. “I think so. Why?”

  “Because I’ll probably have questions.”

  “About my cat?” I heft Zachary’s carrier into the back seat. Already he’s complaining loud enough to be heard in the village.

  Harriet bends to buckle Anna in her car seat. “About our case.”

  “Forget it,” I say. “It’s a lost cause.”

  Straightening, she grasps my shoulders and fixes me with the same penetrating stare she uses to skewer opposing attorneys. “Jill, I’m determined to make this work,” she says, nodding toward my house. “No way am I going to let you lose all this.”

  How does she know? I don’t remember complaining, or—

  “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you’re in trouble,” Harriet says. “No business, no job, and don’t think I haven’t noticed you tightening your belt.”

  Which all seems so bloody insignificant compared to Claudia.

  Heart attack.

  Oh, my God.

  How can everything turn into something as big and black and bottomless as this in the blink of an eye?

  * * *

  Tom drives me to Boston. “No sense leaving your car in long-term parking,” he says, then listens while I reminisce about Claudia.

  Like the time Sophie and I were five and Claudia filled an inflatable dinghy with water for us to play in. We didn’t have bathing suits so we all stripped, even Hugh and Keith, and it was the first time I ever saw a boy’s willy. Trying not to stare, I backed up and sat down hard on the dinghy’s rubber edge and squashed a bee that left its stinger in my bum. It swelled so badly I had to eat supper standing up. Claudia told Edith that the bee had crawled inside my knickers, not that we were frolicking in the Neville’s back garden without our clothes.

  Claudia saved me again and again, including the year I turned seventeen and had just gotten my license. Edith gave me her car keys and a shopping list. “No need to dawdle,” she said. “I don’t want you gallivanting around in my car. No stopping at Sophie’s and don’t you dare go anywhere near that boy.”

  She disapproved of dating, especially going steady, so I had to meet Colin in secret. Sophie always covered for me. This time, I asked Edith if it was okay for me to stop at the library and she allowed as how that was acceptable. After running her errands, I drove to Colin’s and broke down at the end of his driveway. In a panic, I rang Sophie. She borrowed her father’s car and showed up with Claudia who promptly called for a breakdown truck and made the mechanic promise to tell Mrs. Hunter he towed her car from the greengrocer’s shop, not the Carpenter’s house. Then Sophie drove me home and Claudia informed Edith she really ought to pay more attention to her car’s maintenance because poor Jill was stranded in the village with a pound of corned beef and two cabbages, and wasn’t it lucky she and Sophie were available to come and rescue her?

  “Did she buy it?” Tom asks.

  “Hook, line, and sinker,” I say.

  We emerge from the tunnel that runs beneath Boston harbor. Colin had clenched his fists every time I
drove him through it. His face lost its color and his lips formed a thin line. The first time it happened, I thought he was angry. Turns out he was scared.

  Couldn’t handle being tied up with emerald satin, either.

  “I like the sound of your Claudia,” Tom says. “She’s a brave woman.”

  Signs for Logan Airport flash by. Airplanes drone low overhead. Tom navigates the ever present maze of construction and says he’ll be in Europe some time in the New Year. “I’ll call you at Sophie’s if I get to London,” he says, pulling up at the international departures terminal. He opens the trunk and lifts out my suitcase. Sets it down on the curb.

  “I appreciate this,” I say, “but you don’t have to come inside.”

  “I’d like to keep you company.”

  “No, but thanks all the same,” I say, shrinking from the memory of other farewells. Colin walking backward, face crumpled with emotion. Me at the barrier, waving and wanting another kiss. Him, stepping forward, and a man in uniform barring the way. Watching his train disappear because he said my car wouldn’t make the journey to Boston.

  A problem at the lodge that couldn’t wait.

  Tom puts his hands on my shoulders the way Harriet did. “Take care of yourself, and take care of Claudia,” he says. “I’ll miss you.”

  * * *

  After checking my luggage, I browse airport bookstores in search of something to read on the plane. A familiar name catches my eye. Paul Lamont, Lizzie’s favorite author. Is this another thriller? I read the back cover. Sounds more like a love story, so I toss the book in my basket along with two bars of chocolate and a magazine.

  To my surprise, Paul Lamont’s bittersweet novel holds my attention from the very first page and I arrive at Heathrow on the trailing edge of a smudgy winter dawn, stiff and tired, eyeballs scratchy from reading all night.

  If nothing else, it kept me from panicking.

  I take a taxi from the airport and it drops me at Guy’s Hospital. Sophie told me only immediate family are allowed to visit patients in the ICU, so I pretend I’m her sister and almost snatch my pass from the volunteer’s startled hands. Dodging crowds, I race along corridors and try to keep clear of orderlies pushing gurneys. The lifts are taking too long, so I climb three flights of stairs to the ICU and find Hugh, unshaven and bleary-eyed, slumped in a chair outside Claudia’s cubicle. He pulls me into a clumsy hug and I feel the dampness of tears on his cheeks.

  Am I too late?

  “Sophie’s with her now,” Hugh says. Arm resting on my shoulders, he guides me toward a gap in the curtain. “Go on, Mum’s waiting for you.”

  * * *

  Lights blink, monitors beep, and a nurse bends to adjust the clamp on a tube that runs from Claudia’s nose and mouth to a machine on a trolley. Another makes notes on a clipboard and hangs it at the foot of Claudia’s bed.

  Sophie looks up and I rush into her arms. We sway back and forth, murmuring platitudes and clutching one another. I whisper it’s going to be okay. She rubs my back and sobs into my shoulder.

  Loss is easier when you’re young, Tom said.

  “What happened?” I say.

  “Not here,” she replies.

  Claudia’s eyes are closed, but her lips quiver. She can’t speak because of the tube in her mouth. I take her hand in mine, stroke the brittle skin, run my fingers over the bones in her wrist. When had she gotten so old? So frail? Is this the same woman who prowled my beach last summer in a muu muu covered with parrots and palm trees, sat up half the night sketching raccoons, and told me to forgive Edith? I kiss her wrinkled brow and tell her I love her, then follow Sophie through the flowered curtains that hang from u-shaped tracks on the ceiling.

  She nudges Hugh awake and he shuffles into Claudia’s cubicle to take our place. We head for the waiting room and help ourselves to strong tea and stale pastries from a vending machine. Sophie collapses in a brown leather armchair. I throw myself onto a slip-covered couch whose soft pillows are a pleasant surprise, and wish I could fall asleep.

  “Okay, give it to me straight,” I say. “And don’t hold anything back.”

  “I was in the living room,” Sophie says, “going over a job order when Mum came downstairs and stretched out on the sofa, saying she didn’t feel well. We’d eaten curry and a ton of Christmas pud the night before, so I didn’t pay much attention because I figured she had indigestion. God knows, I was still burping up a storm. Then Mum told me her chest hurt, like something heavy was sitting on her breastbone.”

  A man in a rumpled suit enters the room and pours a cup of tea from the urn. Distractedly, he nods at us, then leaves looking as worried as we do.

  Sophie takes a deep breath. “I told her to stay put while I fetched the car, but when I got back, Mum was upstairs brushing her teeth and about to take a bath. So I threatened to call an ambulance if she didn’t cooperate; then I brought her to Guy’s. After that, it was all a blur. Mum was whisked off to an examining room. The walls were a pukey pale green. She had a cardiologist and three nurses. One of them stuck electrodes on her chest and plugged her into some sort of machine, another hung an IV drip, and the doctor put tubes up her nose.”

  I shudder. “When did Hugh get here?” From Sophie’s garbled explanation on the phone, I learned her brother had left on Christmas Eve for a skiing holiday in Austria and she’d had a tough time tracking him down.

  “Yesterday,” Sophie says. “The nurses said Mum was doing better. They’d moved her out of the ICU and into the cardiac ward by then, so I felt okay about leaving for an hour to fetch my brother from the airport. When we got back, Mum’s bed was empty. I freaked. Good thing Hugh was here because I was a gibbering idiot at this point.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Back in the ICU, where they could keep an eye on her,” Sophie says. “Apparently, Mum decided she was fit enough to go home, so she ripped out her tubes and when all the monitors went off at once, the nurses rushed in and found her on the floor. She went into atrial fibrillation and they spent two hours bringing her out of it.”

  “Christ.”

  “Remember when our mothers used to tell us to always wear clean knickers in case we were hit by a bus?” Sophie says.

  I nod.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” she goes on, “because they cut your clothes off with surgical scissors. Mum will be furious when she finds out they shredded her favorite track suit.”

  For the first time since leaving home, I smile. “Then let’s go to Marks and Spencers and buy her another one.”

  Chapter 41

  London

  December 2011

  We take turns at Claudia’s bedside, reading to her and rubbing her chapped lips and hands with aloe which is all we’re allowed to use. Working in shifts, we rotate back to Sophie’s house to shower and change our clothes, feed the dogs, and gather up more books and magazines to keep Claudia entertained. She’s beginning to look better. More color in her face and her eyes seem a bit brighter than usual.

  “How long can you stay?” Sophie asks.

  “As long as you need me.”

  A look of relief sweeps across Sophie’s tired face.

  Finally, after three days, I reach the bottom of my suitcase and discover Colin’s pink shirt wrapped around my funereal black shoes. Is this Lizzie’s idea of a joke? Of course not, Jill. Get a grip. She never saw the damned shirt, except for that picture above my desk. I unroll the sleeves. Sand trickles out; a tiny shell tumbles from the cuff and bounces on Sophie’s spare bed.

  Is there no end to the memories?

  Did anyone, Hugh or Keith, call Colin to tell him about Claudia?

  Jeez, I hope not. Last thing we need is him showing up.

  I run downstairs to make tea and glance at the calendar on Sophie’s desk and realize it’s New Year’s Day. Her message light is blinking. I hit PLAY and listen to an angry woman complain that Sophie had blown off her New Year’s Eve dinner party.

  I erase the message.

&n
bsp; * * *

  Claudia’s condition improves, and by the end of another week she’s well enough to be moved back into the cardiac ward, but not without dire warnings from her doctor.

  “Pull that stunt again,” she says, adjusting Claudia’s drip, “and we’ll strap you to the bed.”

  Dressed in a pale blue bed jacket with satin ribbons, Claudia looks more like Barbie’s grandmother than the woman in Wellington boots who rescued squirrels and roared around Cornwall in her ancient Morris Minor. Soft curls frame her face and a hint of blush dusts her cheeks. Is that lipstick I see?

  Sophie nudges me and grins.

  I pull Paul Lamont’s book from my bag and turn to page one.

  “Let me see that.” Sophie leans over my shoulder. “Hey, Ian’s making a film with this guy.”

  “I didn’t know he was an actor as well.” I look for a picture of the author, but don’t find one.

  “No, silly. He’s written the screenplay for one of his thrillers and Ian says it’s going to be a blockbuster. The next James Bond, but with more violence and sex.”

  “Just what we need.”

  Claudia pipes up. “That nice young doctor told me to wait at least six weeks before having intimate relations,” she says. “Do I really have to?”

  Sophie blushes. She grabs a pillow and threatens to suffocate her mother. I keep reading aloud, and as Claudia tells Sophie to mind her own business, I feel as if something huge and horrible has just been lifted from my heart.

  But when Claudia nags me into visiting Edith, I know she’s really on the mend. “Do you have her address?” she says, pulling her handbag from the night table. “Because if you don’t, then it’s in here somewhere. Now promise me you’ll go?”

  “Of course, I will.” At this point, I’d walk barefoot over glass for her.

  * * *