You Are the Love of My Life

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “When I saw him yesterday, he seemed so much better.”

  “I can almost understand everything he says and the docs expect a full recovery,” Victoria said, heading down the steps. “Lane told me about Maggie by the way. Bummer!”

  IT WAS GETTING dark so the lights in the Mallorys’ house would be on and Lucy might be able to see Maggie. The Mallory boys were wrestling on the front porch, the porch light on, the hall light on, the kitchen dark. Somewhere upstairs, Maggie had to be unpacking her duffel.

  I can’t live with my mother any longer. Was that what Maggie would have said?

  Or had Zee lured Maggie in that way she had of occupying someone’s mind? A child, even a girl as young as Maggie, would begin to believe that Zee Mallory’s thoughts were actually her own.

  “ARE WE GOING to eat dinner tonight?” Felix asked quietly, burrowing his face in her long skirt.

  “Of course we’re going to eat dinner.”

  “But I’m not hungry because Maggie is gone.”

  She picked him up, pressing his warm body against her own.

  “How did you know Maggie had left? Did she tell you?”

  “I just knew.”

  She scrambled eggs and they sat silent at the table nibbling at toast, Felix glancing over at his mother. Lucy could feel him watching her but she didn’t look at him for fear she would weep. And then what? He asked for six stories that night instead of three and she read him all of them even after he had fallen asleep just to hear the comforting sound of her own voice.

  Afterwards she went to Maggie’s room and sat on her bed in the dark, leaning against the pillow, aligning herself in the center where Maggie usually slept, on her back, her arms stretched above her head, her head facing away from the window. Maggie had a way of sleeping with her eyes slightly open, only the whites showing, and when she was very young, the look of her vanilla eyeballs had sent shivers down Lucy’s spine.

  She sat up against the headboard and listened for Felix.

  The lights were still on at the Mallorys’. Lucy could see the shadow of Zee walking across her bedroom.

  If you lose a child, she was thinking, how do you find her in the light of day?

  Late, Lucy didn’t check the time but it felt very late when she heard a knock on the front door and she went to the head of the stairs where she could see a person through the window at the top of the front door if he was tall enough.

  Lane was tall enough and Lucy went downstairs to let her in.

  “I’m sorry to come over at this hour but I noticed the light still on in Maggie’s room and imagined you in there,” Lane said, walking towards the kitchen. “Maeve told me that Maggie ran away from home. Her words.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “To Zee’s.”

  “She hasn’t let me know but I assume she’s at Zee’s.”

  “She is.”

  It was midnight by the clock over the stove. Midnight and Reuben hadn’t called. Certainly he could have found a telephone on the street and called if Elaine and Nell were in the house all day. He could have found a way on this most terrible day in Lucy’s life.

  “Something is the matter with Zee,” Lane said. “That’s really why I’ve come over to talk to you. You must have noticed.”

  “I’ve noticed that she’s very nervous.”

  “She’s lost interest in everything, our group of friends, August, her own children. Adam is worried to death. We’re all worried.”

  “I am worried about Maggie,” Lucy said evenly.

  “Of course. Of course you are. Zee has always had a thing for little girls. Will knows about mental breakdowns of course, since that’s his work, and he thinks she is having one.”

  Lane got up from the table.

  “I had no idea it was so late. I seldom sleep.”

  “Are you suggesting that Maggie is at risk?”

  “I’m actually saying nothing except that Zee seems to be falling apart.”

  Lucy followed Lane to the door.

  “Even the day that August arrived and Miles Robinson went to your house for dinner, Zee was sharp-tongued, remember? And she’s never been like that. Always lovely to all of us.”

  Lucy opened the door, turning on the porch light as Lane walked down the front steps.

  “Good luck,” Lane called, and blew her a kiss.

  “Thank you. Thank you for coming over,” Lucy said, realizing as she spoke that she had meant it.

  The Mallorys’ house was dark, a filtered light coming from Zee and Adam’s bedroom, otherwise completely dark in the front. She couldn’t see the back and she had never been upstairs although people said there were a lot of bedrooms so Maggie must have been sleeping in one of them and then the twins, either together or apart, and Zee. Possible that Adam slept alone.

  She would go to the Mallorys’ first thing in the morning when things seem more possible than in the dark and Adam Mallory was sober.

  Maggie could say No. Likely she would and Lucy would throw her daughter over her shoulder, knock Zee Mallory to the floor with the other arm, Do not ever come near us again—cross the street, up the steps to the house, and drop Maggie onto the new couch.

  This is the house where you live, she would say. And I am your mother.

  She crawled into bed with Felix, moving as close to him as she could so his breath was synchronized with her breath, the heat of his body warming her skin.

  What she felt was homesick.

  Felix flung his small, plump arm across her breast.

  “Mama?” he asked, lifting his head. “Who is your best friend?”

  “You are and Maggie.”

  “But me and Maggie are children.”

  “I suppose I like children best then.”

  “My best friend is Teddy Sewall, but he doesn’t like me so much because I’m little.”

  “Little and amazing.” She kissed his hot, damp cheek.

  “I know,” he said sleepily. “You always tell me I’m amazing.”

  A full moon flooded the room with the kind of strange incandescent light that agitates the spirit, and as Felix slept, Lucy found her mind a rushing river.

  In the house on Capitol Hill where she grew up, home was her father’s study and she used to sit in a big leather chair, her legs over the arms, a drawing pad on her lap, sketching the girls in her class as animals, not specific animals but invented ones, and while she worked, her father was at his desk, papers piled high, reading or talking on the telephone. From time to time, he blew her a kiss across the room.

  “Jump shot to you from me,” he’d say, and they’d both laugh although she didn’t understand jump shot but it didn’t matter.

  ZEE SAT UP in bed, her arms wrapped around her legs, listening to her house. In the boys’ room silence so they must have been sleeping. Adam was in the kitchen by the refrigerator, of course, and walking up the steps to the second floor, down the hall to the study. Maggie was lying in bed in the guest room reading, Blue and Onion licking their bellies at the bottom of her bed.

  After Adam went to the study, Zee tiptoed down the hall, knocked lightly on Maggie’s door, and walked in.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.” Maggie stretched and yawned.

  “I’m so happy you’re here. Deliriously happy.”

  “Me too.”

  She knelt down on the bottom of the bed, her body too warm, her head splintering, not with a headache although it ached but rather with a kind of rawness as if her skin were bark and it was peeling off the trunk. Maybe she had a fever.

  “I feel a little peculiar being here when I live there,” Maggie said. “That’s all.”

  “You’ll get over that. This is just a break, right?” Zee said, taking Maggie’s foot in her hand, rubbing her ankles. “We all need a break from our daily life.”

  Adam was in their bedroom when she went back, in the dark, the room lit by the moon, sitting on the end of the bed, her nightgown in his hands.

  “Wha
t are you doing?”

  “This was in the bathroom I’m using.” He handed it to her. “Zee?”

  “Can we not talk tonight?”

  “I think there’s something the matter with you. I’m worried. Not angry, not sarcastic, not any of the things I’ve been. Just worried.”

  “I think there’s something the matter with both of us, Adam.”

  “So what are we going to do?” he asked, rubbing his hands.

  “Tonight, we’re going to bed. Then you’ll go to Assateague with the boys and you’ll come back and we’ll talk. Just like you said.”

  MAGGIE TURNED OUT the light and lay on her back waiting for sleep. The moon filled her bedroom with shimmering light and she was restless. She had planned to show Zee the pages from August’s manuscript to see if she had heard of Samuel Baldwin, who had died on Witchita Avenue. Maybe she had known him.

  But the pages were intended for Lucy. It was possible they might reveal something about her mother that Maggie wouldn’t understand because there were secrets that had been kept from her for a reason.

  She didn’t feel safe at home any longer and she didn’t feel safe at the Mallorys’ either. Maybe, she was thinking, she would never sleep again.

  Seventeen

  ZEE WATCHED ADAM load up the van with the backpacks and coolers, his old cooking gear from high school overnights at Lake Michigan, a new four-man tent he’d purchased for the occasion. It was early Friday morning and the women in the neighborhood were gathered on the steps of her porch, Rufus and Daniel playing soccer in the front yard, Victoria skipping down the front steps of August’s house. The weekend was promising, sunny with occasional clouds, less heat and humidity than usual in late July.

  Across the hall, Maggie was in the bathroom taking a shower.

  “What are you going to do when we’re gone, Mom?” Luke came in the room to kiss her goodbye.

  “I’ll go swimming with my friends and maybe go to the movies,” she said, giving him a hug.

  “You never go swimming,” Luke said.

  “Maybe I will today. I haven’t made a plan yet.”

  But she did have a plan. She had made it days ago when Adam agreed to take the boys to Assateague.

  “Will Maggie be here when we get back?” Luke asked.

  “As far as I know.”

  “Daniel wanted me to find out because he doesn’t like her very much.”

  “I know that.”

  “Daniel says you like to pretend she’s your little girl.”

  “Well Daniel doesn’t know everything, Luke.”

  She kissed him goodbye and watched as he ran down the front steps and climbed into the backseat of the van with Daniel, dragging poor Blue, who was too feeble for a camping trip with boys.

  Adam was on his way upstairs to get his backpack and she braced herself for an interrogation like the ones she had from him every night since Maggie had moved into the guest room. He was worried about her, he said. She was anxious and irritable. He actually missed the things about her that used to drive him crazy.

  “I don’t want anything to happen, Zee,” he’d said.

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Like something. Lately you’ve seemed unsteady.” His voice drifted off. “Increasingly unsteady.”

  Adam was right. She knew something was the matter with her. She felt untethered, floating in an unfamiliar atmosphere, illness coming on like influenza for weeks. Disconnected images streamed through her mind. Just that morning she woke up with a sense of weight in her right hand as if the hand itself had doubled in size while she slept. Examining it in the morning light—were her eyes open or was this an image in her mind?—the hand was unrecognizable, in the process of changing shape, hardening, becoming what was in fact a block of wood, painted white with the letter C on it. An old-fashioned alphabet block. C for cat and for carrot and for coal and for coat and for crayon—a yellow tabby cat, an ordinary carrot, a piece of black coal, a red coat, a purple crayon.

  She’d shaken it until it began to materialize again as a hand, her own hand with silver bangles and a turquoise ring on the index finger.

  A picture settled in her mind. She was in the backyard of their stone and stucco row house in West Philadelphia where Adam was in his last year of law school at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania. Zee was throwing away the toys, the teddy bears and fuzzy rabbits and musical mobiles, even the wooden alphabet blocks which had belonged to Zee when she was a child.

  “Your mother called,” Adam said. “You were taking a shower. I told her you didn’t seem yourself. Together was the word I used, but together doesn’t translate in Revere, Michigan.”

  “I’ll call her back.”

  The night before her mother, who called regularly now that Adam had told her Zee was coming apart, had remarked that it was troubling for Zee to take in someone else’s daughter just because she wasn’t speaking to her mother. Taking advantage, her mother said. And didn’t Zee think it would be a good idea to talk to someone about it.

  “Who would you suggest?” Zee had asked.

  “Like a church pastor,” her mother said. “One of those people who helps you out of trouble.”

  “A therapist is what you mean.”

  “One of those, yes,” her mother said. “Because you have never spoken to anyone about the accident, even to Adam. That’s what he said. He said you won’t talk about troubles and these things can grow like cabbage inside you and take up all the room.”

  “My troubles are fine, Mother, not at all like cabbage, whatever that means.”

  Adam stood at the door to their bedroom.

  “We’ll be at the campgrounds and back on Sunday before dinner,” he said. “If you need help, any help, call Will Sewall. He’s an excellent doctor.”

  “You’ve had occasion to prove that?”

  “Zee, trust me. I love you. I want this not to be happening.”

  “A double negative?”

  “If anything, it’s a double positive,” he said, and left, pausing beside the van to speak to Josie.

  Across the street, Lucy had descended the long length of steps in front of her house and was standing with Felix next to the brick wall, leaning against it, seeming to watch the Mallorys’ front porch where Zee’s chicks had gathered for coffee.

  Adam backed the van into the avenue and headed off, waving to the women on the porch.

  Maggie was out of the shower and dressed in shorts over a bathing suit, on her way downstairs. Zee heard her bare feet on the hardwood floor and called her, not wishing to run the risk of running into Lucy especially, or any of the women on her porch.

  “Your mother’s in front of your house and may be coming over here,” Zee said. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “With Felix?”

  “Yes, Felix is there.”

  Maggie went into Zee’s bedroom, where she was pulling clothes out of the closet stuffing them into her small duffel.

  “I’d like to tell Felix goodbye so he’ll know I’m not mad at him while we’re away on this trip.”

  “Of course, Maggie,” Zee said, her voice soft. “But I wonder whether it will make it more difficult for Felix when you go.”

  “Why would it?”

  “I may be completely wrong, but you know children and how they can worry if you tell them you’re leaving but not worry if they don’t know you’ve left.”

  Lucy had called Zee that morning.

  “Just checking on Maggie,” she’d said.

  “She’s fine. No problem,” Zee said, the tone of her voice disarming. “I’ll take good care of her and in no time she’ll be ready to go home.”

  Lucy didn’t reply and it sounded as if she had disconnected but Zee couldn’t be sure.

  “Did you tell my mom we were going to wherever?” Maggie asked.

  “Of course.”

  “And she said okay?”

  “She didn’t say okay but she didn’t say no.”

  Zee ha
d not told Lucy and Lucy wouldn’t have said okay but she wasn’t going to risk delaying their departure while Maggie worried over whether or not to leave.

  “Of course, your mother would rather you didn’t go,” Zee said. “She’d rather you go back home but I told her about our trip and not to worry and she seemed fine with that.”

  Zee had spoken carefully. Some truth but not too much.

  “You do want to come with me, don’t you?” Zee asked with just the right cheerful tone.

  Maggie’s face was turned towards the stairwell window overlooking the front of the house so she could see Lucy and Felix across the street. He was leaning against Lucy’s legs, his small arms folded across his chest. She would write a note to Felix, an I love you forever note, quickly out of Zee’s sight and ask Maeve to leave it on the front porch.

  “I do want to come,” she said,

  “Great!” Zee hurried on, not to leave space for reconsidering. “I thought you did. We’re off then in just a few minutes. Are you packed?”

  “I’m packed.”

  “Take a sweater. It’ll be cold at night.”

  “I have one.”

  “And any of my jewelry you’d like to wear, second drawer on the left in the bathroom.”

  Zee watched Maggie go back into the guest room and come out with her packed duffel, smiling as she headed into Zee and Adam’s bathroom.

  “I borrowed your turquoise and yellow beads with a silver cross.”

  “Perfect on you,” Zee said.

  Outside in the street, Gabriel Russ had materialized and was talking to Lucy.

  MAGGIE HAD BEEN thinking of Felix, how small and wide-eyed and serious he was, how much he loved her. She could feel the way his brown eyes followed her around the room, melting in dark streams when she came home from school or lay on her mother’s bed and read to him.

  At night before she went to sleep in the blue guest room at the Mallorys’ house, she’d blow him a kiss across the street, projecting his face on her mind’s screen, wondering if he could feel her thinking of him.

  “So let’s bolt out the back door now, darling,” Zee said. “I’ll feed Onion and grab some fruit for the ride. We’re taking Adam’s car, which is parked in the alley.”