You Are the Love of My Life

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “Not necessarily a crisis,” the one officer said to Lucy as he left, but kindly.

  She hurried down the front steps and crossed the street where Adam was unpacking the camping gear.

  “Do you know where Zee is?” she asked.

  “Sleeping, I assume.”

  “She’s gone. She left with Maggie yesterday after you did,” Lucy said. “She took Maggie.”

  Adam opened the side door of the van and let the rumpled, sleepy boys out with Blue, who ambled after them, and put his backpack strap over his shoulder.

  “Want to come in?” he asked.

  “I will,” she said, following him into his house. “But Felix’s still sleeping.”

  “We couldn’t sleep in Assateague,” Adam said. “There were enough mosquitoes to kill an army so we got up, packed our gear, and came home.” He unlocked the front door. “I’ll check Zee. She hasn’t been well.”

  “What does that mean?” Lucy asked, going up the stairs behind him.

  “Zee’s been off her game but she’d never hurt a flea if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said.

  Zee’s bedroom door was open, the bed made, clothes strewn across the floor as if she’d dropped them on her way out.

  Adam checked the answering machine but there were no calls. No note left in an obvious place.

  “You’ve got to help me, Adam,” Lucy said.

  “I’ll get the boys in their beds and then I’ll call around.”

  He walked back downstairs with Lucy.

  “I’ll get back to you once I know.”

  FELIX WAS STILL sleeping at seven when the day was fully light, warm, not hot with a breeze from the south. Lucy stayed on the porch, sitting on the top step, needing to be outside in case there was news which she might miss. Nothing seemed to be happening at the Mallorys’. The boys had probably fallen into bed but Lucy hoped that Adam would be over to tell her as soon as he knew something.

  By seven-thirty, the neighborhood was up, Miles Robison walking to the bus, working on a Saturday. He waved, walked on, but something must have occurred to him because he turned back, came halfway up the steps.

  “I’m sorry, Lucy. Robin has kept me up on what’s happening.”

  He was an awkward man and she was grateful that he took notice of her alone on the steps and bothered to speak to her this morning.

  Lane, in her robe, waved as she came out to get the paper.

  “Any word?”

  “Not yet,” Lucy said.

  Josie called across the street to ask if Felix wanted to go to a puppet show with Rufus at ten.

  “Not today,” Lucy said. “I need him with me.”

  She made scrambled eggs and toast and juice which Felix ate sitting on the front step of the porch next to her, his body pressed up next to hers. She brought her coffee.

  “Is Maggie coming home yet?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Lucy said, reaching in the pocket of her jeans for the note Maggie had written to Felix. “She sent you a note and Maeve put it in our mailbox. Do you want me to read it to you?”

  He nodded.

  “Dear Felix, my brother, is how it begins. I will love you forever.”

  “I know that,” Felix said matter-of-factly.

  “Well that’s what she writes in her letter to you.”

  He took the note written on lined school paper and looked at it.

  “Is forever today?” he asked.

  “And tomorrow and the next day and the next and the next.”

  He crumpled the paper and put it down between them.

  “Can I watch TV?” he asked.

  “We don’t have a TV,” Lucy said.

  “I know that, of course.”

  He finished his eggs and took the plate back to the kitchen.

  “Can I watch TV at Maeve and Teddy’s house?”

  Lucy hesitated.

  “I would like you to stay here with me, Felix.”

  He was pensive, resting his elbows on his knees, leaning his chin on his fists.

  “Sometimes eggs taste yucky,” he said. “Like these eggs were a little yucky.”

  Down the street, Robin Robinson was walking their new Lab puppy and waved and kept on walking up the street, stopping at Lucy’s, coming up the steps.

  “Maybe I’ll play war on the kitchen floor because we don’t have a playroom like the Mallorys do.” He got up. “Some of my soldiers are going to be dead in the war and I’ll need new ones.”

  “Later,” Lucy said. “This afternoon. We’ll check the toy store.”

  Robin sat down on the step, lifting the wiggly puppy into her lap.

  “Lane called me last night,” she said. “Have you heard anything from Zee?”

  Lucy shook her head.

  “Nothing so far. Adam didn’t even know she had left,” Lucy said. “He thought she was home.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Robin said. “It’s awful. I don’t know what else to say.” She put her hand lightly on Lucy’s knee. “Something is the matter with Zee, whom I love. Suddenly, just this summer, it’s happened. Or maybe since August fell.”

  That’s how the women spoke of Zee, as if to tell any actual truth about her was a betrayal.

  “I don’t know Zee that well,” Lucy said.

  “Children love her.”

  Lucy expected Robin to leave then, everything said that could have been said between them, a pleasantry, a note of sympathy. But she didn’t leave and for a while she didn’t speak, both of them looking out on the avenue as if there were some expectation.

  It was Robin who interrupted the silence.

  “Maybe you’ve heard that I had an abortion.”

  Lucy sat very still, her stomach tight.

  “Miles told you.”

  “Not exactly,” Lucy said.

  “He told me that he had.”

  “He told me that he thought you had.”

  Robin leaned against Lucy, holding the railing to pull herself up.

  “He told me he kissed you but don’t worry. It was Miles, not you. I’ve been so cold with him—but last night thinking about Maggie and about you, I simply wept myself to sleep. I wanted you to know that.”

  And she walked down the steps, the puppy under her arm, hurrying up Witchita to her house without looking back.

  It was almost eight, a bright, unforgiving sun moving overhead, already hot when Adam banged through his screen door and dashed down the front steps. He had showered and changed clothes as if it were a workday.

  “Zee’s in the hospital,” he said. “But Maggie’s fine. She should be calling you.”

  “Was there an accident?”

  “No accident. Zee is ill,” he said. “She was taken to a hospital there.”

  “Where is there?”

  “Cavendish, Vermont. A friend that Zee knows in Cavendish has taken Maggie in. They arrived last night.”

  He was standing halfway up the steps, his hands in his pockets, his hair rumpled, too long, his eyes flat as if they had died early before his body gave out.

  “I drink too much,” he said. “I need to stop.”

  And he left, hurrying down the steps, across the street, and into

  his own house.

  MAGGIE DIDN’T CALL.

  Lucy sat on the floor playing on the enemy side of Felix’s war game, watching the clock almost by the minute, waiting for the phone to ring.

  “You’re not good at being the enemy, Mama,” Felix said.

  “I’m sorry, Felix. I don’t like to be the enemy.”

  8:25. She would wait until 8:30 and then go over to the Mallorys’. She hadn’t even asked where in Vermont Zee was taken to the hospital.

  Onion was sitting on the front porch biting her nails, the front door shut and locked when Lucy tried it. Blue splayed on the rug in the hall didn’t even lift his head. She knocked again but no one answered.

  She would go home and call the Mallorys first and if Adam didn’t answer she’d call the police again. She had
the description of Adam’s Toyota, D.C. license. An all-state alarm. That should be possible.

  Across the street, Mrs. Greene was standing on the sidewalk in her straw gardening hat with her clippers addressing the azaleas in the front yard of her house.

  “The Mallorys aren’t at home,” she called. “Adam left a few minutes ago with the boys in a Diamond taxi.” She pushed the brim of her gardening hat off her face, wiped the perspiration from her brow. “I don’t know why he called Diamond, do you? Yellow Cab is so much better.”

  Lucy’s stomach fell. She took Felix in her arms and walked without breath the distance between the Mallorys’ front yard and her front steps. Passing her VW van, she might not have noticed the note on the windshield if Felix hadn’t called it to her attention.

  “We got another letter from Maggie,” he said. “On our van.”

  From Adam Mallory printed in pencil on the back of a laundry slip:

  The Children’s Home. Cavendish Vermont. Adam

  MAGGIE STAYED IN the passenger seat of Adam Mallory’s blue Toyota facing forward as the ambulance pulled up without its sirens and stopped behind the car. Zee, agitated, her arms flailing, was sitting on the ground with Angela, the nurse, and Laura, the girl on night duty, and an older man in blue jeans and a dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up. Perhaps he was a doctor. Maggie hadn’t seen him arrive.

  She watched them put Zee on the stretcher with straps around her chest and legs, the nurse, Angela, holding her hand, her face close to Zee’s, and Zee struggling to get free.

  Then Angela was leaning in the car, her breath on Maggie, the cinnamon scent of Dentine chewing gum.

  “What an awful trip for you,” Angela said.

  “Not great,” Maggie said.

  “You should get out of the car and come in. There’s food in the fridge, I can make you an omelet. I doubt you’ve even had dinner.”

  Maggie climbed out of the car.

  “Do you have luggage?” Angela asked.

  “Just a backpack.”

  Maggie followed Angela across the lawn. The girl, Laura, put her hand under Maggie’s arm, lifting as if she were too weak to stand, and then they were at the house and Angela opened the door, flooding the porch with light.

  “I’m Angela,” the nurse said, pouring Maggie a glass of lemonade, taking chocolate chip cookies out of the cupboards. “And this is Laura.”

  Laura sat down at the table next to her.

  “I’m Maggie Painter,” Maggie said, helping herself to a handful of cookies. “We didn’t stop on the highway to eat.”

  Angela put Maggie in a bedroom at the head of the stairs on the second floor with a single bed and a dresser and a rocking chair, a small rag rug on the floor, a cheap reproduction of a Mary Cassatt painting with a fleshy red-cheeked mother, a powder-puff baby on her lap—two windows overlooking the back of the house from which Maggie could see the slender silver moon curled in a perfect C, a splattering of stars.

  “Does your mother know where you are?” Angela asked, standing at the doorway to Maggie’s room.

  “She knows I’m with Zee,” Maggie said.

  “You’ve met Miranda?”

  “I haven’t met her,” Maggie said.

  She wasn’t sure about Miranda—who she was or what her relationship was to the Mallorys. But she was beginning to understand that there had been a story and any truth about Miranda would not surprise her.

  “It’s her birthday tomorrow. That’s probably why you and Mrs. Mallory came to Cavendish,” Angela said brightly. “She’s going to be twelve.”

  “We did come for her birthday,” Maggie said, deciding it was wise to seem completely informed.

  “Well, you’ll get to meet her in the morning.”

  The sheets were crisp, a cotton blanket on the bed, a flat pillow, too flat. She climbed under the sheet fully dressed, listening to the noises in the house like mewing, as if the house had kittens stuffed in the corners of it.

  She propped up her thin pillow, folding it in half. She needed to stay awake all night and in the morning, early before anyone was up, before she had to meet Miranda, she’d find a telephone and call a taxicab and go to a bus station or a train station and home.

  She lay in bed wide awake and watched the night go on and on. At one point, the necklaces she’d taken from Zee’s drawer became so much the focus of her attention that she took them off, got out of bed, opened the dresser, and put them in the empty drawer, climbing back under the sheets. It was too cold, she thought, and took the sweater Zee had suggested she bring from her backpack.

  As the night wore on, she found herself thinking about her house in Witchita Hills, about her room and her mother’s room and how the sun came into the kitchen in the morning, turning the old table yellow, how Lucy looked in her jeans and paint shirt, her back to the kitchen table, scrambling eggs. She could imagine the smell of sugar cookies baking in the oven in their old apartment in New York, greeting her when she opened the door coming from school.

  Everyone she knew in New York City loved Lucy. Maggie had been proud of that.

  She’d have to call Rebecca Malone as soon as she got back home. She hadn’t talked to her since she’d left New York although for a while, they had written letters back and forth about this and that. But nothing all summer, nothing since Maggie had fallen in love with Zee Mallory.

  She wanted to start over from the beginning before things began to change. A revision was what Maggie was after. She’d begin when she was eight years old and completely happy, on the day that Felix came home from the hospital and Reuben was there with carrot soup and hot bread which he had made himself and flowers for Lucy and balloons and a locket for Maggie, which she had lost the next day at school but never told Reuben.

  She watched the sky brighten, fading black to charcoal gray, to light gray, and then she must have fallen asleep. When she opened her eyes, the room was light, the sun exploding through the window, laughter from somewhere on the floor below. She jumped out of bed, made the bed tight at the corners as if she had never slept there, zipped her backpack, and went downstairs. The mewing had stopped but somewhere she heard voices.

  The downstairs of the house was spare with couches and children’s toys in the living room and dining room and a large kitchen with a table in the middle, a telephone by the stove.

  “Hello, Maggie.”

  Laura was making oatmeal.

  “The children left early this morning for an excursion to the playground but they’ll be back soon.”

  “What about Zee?” Maggie asked. “Where did they take her?”

  “They took her to the hospital in town but it’s a very small hospital so they are moving her to a different one in Hanover, New Hampshire, not far from here, but the facilities in Hanover can take care of her illness.”

  “What is her illness?” Maggie asked.

  “She had a kind of breakdown according to Angela,” Laura, the girl, said without hesitation, giggles spilling out of her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s not funny but sometimes I laugh when I’m nervous and last night made me nervous. Besides, I’m from New England and we tell the truth here.”

  “Will she be okay?” Maggie asked quietly.

  “Nobody has told me anything except your mother called—I almost forgot—and she said she’s coming to get you.”

  “Coming to get me?”

  “She’ll be here by lunchtime because she’s flying to Lebanon, New Hampshire, which is pretty close to here and then she’s renting a car and picking you up and then she’s driving back to Lebanon and you’re taking an airplane home.” She poured the runny oatmeal she had been making into a bowl. “I’m pretty good at information. Brown sugar in your oatmeal? Milk?”

  “Brown sugar is fine,” Maggie said. She was upset that Lucy was coming—coming even before she had a chance to think about what had happened with Zee.

  She hated oatmeal.

  “Did you hear the commotion last night?”
Laura asked, plopping down across from Maggie.

  “I heard what sounded like kittens.”

  “That was Miranda and she was making her little kitten cries. So adorable. I’m sure Mrs. Mallory told you that she doesn’t speak.”

  “Yes, she told me,” Maggie said, hoping that the flatness of her response would silence the girl, Laura. She didn’t want to talk about Miranda, and she didn’t want to see her.

  Miranda, who mewed but could not speak, was the name Zee had called Maggie, as if in Zee Mallory’s mind she had slowly merged with this child, Miranda.

  Laura put bread in the toaster.

  “Mrs. Mallory didn’t let us know she was coming so it was a complete surprise,” Laura said. “Mr. Mallory comes. Twice a year at least. But not Mrs. Mallory. Are you their niece?”

  “No, their friend,” Maggie said. “Good friend. We live across the street.”

  Maggie got up and rinsed out her bowl in the sink.

  “What did my mother say when she called?”

  “The telephone rang and I answered and she said this is Lucy and I understand that my daughter might have arrived at your place with Zelda Mallory and I said yes and she’s still sleeping and your mother said that she, your mother, would be arriving in Lebanon on the eleven o’clock plane and all the rest I told you about, including renting a car. I agreed that it was about a forty-five-minute drive and I would tell you the details.”

  “Did she say anything about my little brother, Felix?”

  “She did, and asked me to tell you that Felix would be staying with someone named August while your mother is coming to Vermont to pick you up and also that you will be home in Washington, D.C., in time for dinner.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up so I could talk to her?”

  “Because she didn’t ask me to wake you up. She said she was in a hurry to make the plane.”

  The front door opened.

  “Lucky you,” Laura said. “They’re back from the playground so you’ll have a chance to meet Miranda.”

  THE PLANE TO Lebanon was a prop and almost empty. Lucy sat in the window seat. A young man was directly across the aisle in jeans, a baseball cap reversed, a broken arm in a sling. Seventeen people on the plane in all.

  The cab had been late and as she hurried down the front steps when it arrived, Will Sewall was bounding down his steps, running across the street waving an envelope.