Robin Black - Life Drawing

“What happened?” I asked. “Exactly, I mean.”

He had grabbed the shoulders of the nurse helping him button his pajamas. “It’s often something simple like that. Something for which there’s no real explanation. He shook her. Pretty hard. Your father is a very strong man still. Surprisingly so.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said — though I knew an apology wasn’t quite right. Sorry for what? For my father being ravaged by a disease? For his having worked so hard all those years to stay strong and well for his girls? Running those endless laps around the school field every afternoon. Pulling himself up on the bar tensed across the door to the bedroom he and my mother once shared, stopping often at that threshold, on his way to grab his wallet, to change his shoes, and just lift himself once or twice. A devotion, I’d thought unexpectedly, when home from college one time. A little act of remembrance, a piety. What had seemed so peculiar, so irritating —Hurry up, Dad! Oh for God’s sake, just go in and find your keys! — had struck me that day as something beautiful.

“It was almost sexual,” I told Owen, not many years after. “But not in an icky way. Like he was still physically devoting himself to her. And of course it was all about being sure we had at least one healthy parent left. I just think it was also about more than that …”

But of course I had been perpetually desperate for signs that she still mattered to him, that the door he’d slammed after her death had panes through which something still shone through, maybe something of her that I would one day see.

The nurse said, “It’s easier with the ones who have grown physically weak. Though, as I say, this may well have just been a one-time event. We like to report all such incidents right away. Then if we do have to move him into a different level of care, you’ll understand …”

“Yes. Of course.” Something occurred to me. “Which nurse was it?”

“Lydia. She’s fairly new.”

I told her we had met. I rolled my eyes to the inexplicable heavens. Having their cruel little laugh. Poor girl.

“I’ll come check in on things today,” I said. “Maybe a familiar face will help.”

At Alison’s door, I was like the girl hanging out by the locker of her latest crush just hoping he’ll ask her out. “And so, that’s why I won’t be around today … or anyway, for the morning.”

She asked if I wanted company. “Or is Owen …?”

“I’m letting Owen work.”

“Well … I could actually use a change of scene,” she said. “Unless it feels too … I don’t mean to intrude.” She knew better though. She would be ready in ten minutes. We would meet back on her side of the hill.

She drove. “It will do me good to be behind the wheel,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll never learn my way around this part of the world. I’m hopeless at maps. And anyway, you look like you could use an hour in the passenger seat.”

This is us on the road to the finest private hell that money can buy:

We are seated close together, or so it seems to me, used to my van as I am. Two middle-aged women. I am in a jean skirt and black T-shirt; and with my arms inactive on my lap I am aware of the paint that clings to me even when I believe I have scrubbed it off. My hands, my wrists, seem covered in a translucent extra layer of skin, almost reptilian, adhering to the pores and fine lines beneath, pulling the texture of me into view. I feel grubby, overly conscious of this sheath. And Alison is in one of her bright colors again — a teal dress. Her car smells like her. As we pull off the property, out onto the road, I realize there is a scent I now associate with her. Spring flowers. Lime. For a moment, I close my eyes and breathe in, trying as I do to pull apart the strands of scent.

“I knew it,” she says. “You’re tired.”

“Yes.” I open my eyes. “Tired. But I’m not sleepy.”

“That’s good. Because I’m …” She laughs. “I should have warned you. You’re in no danger of dozing off. I’m mildly famous for driving like a …”

“Maniac?” I ask. “Is that how that sentence ends?”

“That sounds about right. I may have heard that word tossed about before. Once or twice.” She takes a curve with a gusto that lands me right against the door. “I’m very good though,” she says. “I just … I just enjoy myself …”

“Okay.” I sit up straighter, braced. “So, what about your parents?” I ask. It isn’t a subject change — the car is full of our mission, of my concern.

“My parents?” she asks, as though I have inquired about a pair of unicorns. “Oh, they’re just fine. Young. Mid-seventies. Fit. They require no care and … and that’s probably just as well, as I can’t imagine myself back there. My sense of filial duty is …” She slams us to a stop. “My sense of filial duty is not all that it could be. And impossible as this now seems, I fell so madly in love with Paul there was no chance I’d stay over there. He was a student in London, that’s how we met. Now of course there’s also Nora. It’s unimaginable being that far from her, especially with her father …”

She lets the thought go unfinished. It’s often unclear how much she wants this subject pursued, so for some time I say nothing, just sit, holding on, thinking how strange it is that this road I have driven dozens of times, so sorrowfully bland, is now mined with near misses and jolts.

“I’m sorry,” she says at a particularly sharp swerve. “But you were warned.”

If she were Owen, I would answer, “Well, I was warned when it was too late — which technically isn’t a warning at all,” but I don’t quite feel the closeness yet for that. And so instead I say, “It’s not bad having a little excitement in my life,” and she says, “No indeed. It’s not bad at all.”

Her cell phone chirps. “Not while you’re driving,” I say, and she tells me to extract it from her bag. On the screen there’s a text: “Labor Day weekend’s good. Heather can drive.”

I read it to Alison, whose demeanor suddenly shifts. What I’d thought was enjoyment, even happiness, was nothing compared to what she looks like now.

“Nora,” she says, unnecessarily.

The mention of one young woman has brought another to my mind. Laine. To whose email I have yet to reply. “Well, here we are,” I say, as Alison slides into a space marked Family .

As a child, I had been only vaguely aware that my father had served in World War II, just at the tail end, stationed in England — doing what? I never asked. My mother’s death, barely mentioned though it was, seemed so much the focal point of all personal history in our lives, it was as though time began for us when it stopped for her. Maybe this is what happens to everyone — not necessarily sudden deaths, but certain events that create distinct before and after lines, walls really, requiring a great effort to climb, discouraging doing so.

That was what I thought about as I sat in my father’s room, having introduced him to Alison, whose British accent had spurred him to say, “Oh, I remember you. You’re that girl my buddy had the big crush on. Kenny. He cried on the boat all the way home. Did you know?”

Maybe we do move from one era of our own lives to another, the way we change residences. Doors shut, no key left in the mailbox, only the uncanny slippage of my father’s mind allowing him to sneak back in.

I could imagine, as I listened to them “reminisce” about the war, that the death of his thirty-one-year-old wife might so have redefined him that even memories of war had felt out of reach. Another life. But how had I failed to be aware of that whole era of his history? How had his role in World War II not entered my consciousness? All the work in which I’d been immersed, Jackie Mayhew, Oliver Farley, others, and it had never struck me that my father too had been an American boy sent over to Europe to fight?