Robin Black - Life Drawing

I stared over at Alison’s, remembering all those long black nights of childhood as one infinite time of unspeakable terror and loneliness. I had felt most motherless then, most lost, each darkening day an echo of the death that haunted me. Until Owen. Owen taught me to love the darkness, to view it as a necessary respite from a world of visibility, a world in which as a painter I was eternally vigilant. And that was how I first knew I loved him. That I no longer felt bereft at the nightly departure of the sun.

The calls didn’t stop. Two or three a night. Sometimes she answered but no one was ever there. No one who spoke, anyway. Sometimes she just let it ring. After nearly a week, she agreed to stay in our house, if only once, so she could get a single decent night’s sleep, but she left all the lights on at her own place anyway. “If he’s watching,” she said, “I don’t want him to think anything has changed. I don’t want him knowing I’m afraid.” I didn’t point out that if he — whoever — was watching, he would know from the lights themselves that she was afraid. There was no point trying to reason with her. By then, having barely slept for days, she wasn’t thinking logically.

She was to sleep in the spare room down the hall, a space never occupied enough to be called a guest room. I spent a good amount of time trying to make it a welcoming space for her. Flowers. A pretty set of sheets. I dusted the old wardrobe. Took the braided rug outside to shake it clean — or if not clean, then fresher, anyway. I knocked some cobwebs off the ceiling with a broom, out of the corners, off the upper ledge of the door.

And of course she’d be using the spare bath — the one that had been renovated early that summer. I stepped into it for the first time in many weeks, a clean towel, a bar of fresh soap, in hand. We had kept the original fixtures, the claw-foot tub, the sink with its separate hot and cold taps. The milky blue subway tile I had chosen and the pristinely painted pale gray walls gave those porcelain pieces from nearly a century before an aura of something like dignity.

I stood there for some time, not unlike the way I had sat in the cemetery, though this time it wasn’t the reality of the dead in which I was trying to believe, it was the spirit of all the life that had been lived in this home. There must have been generations of children bathed in that tub, and couples who stood side by side at the sink. I had spent so much time attuned to the dead of the house. I was grateful to let the living into my consciousness as well.

Alison came by after dinner. “I’m already imposing enough,” she said. “You don’t have to feed me too.” I took her upstairs and she said all the right things about the room. It would be like staying at an inn for the night. She was certain she would sleep well. Just as I was going to leave her alone, Owen peered around the door and said, “Why don’t you give me your phone, Alison? I’ll answer it. Let him hear a male voice.”

I saw her hesitate, but then she handed it to him, like a child turning in a confiscated toy.

“Something tells me it isn’t going to ring,” Owen said quietly, as we settled into bed.

“Why do you say that?”

“A hunch. That’s all.”

“Well, that’s a complete cop-out. Calling it a hunch. You really think she’s lying? She’d have to be a pretty great actress. She looks like hell. And I’m not sure what the motive would be.”

“You’re assuming there’s something rational going on.”

I gave his arm a slap. “Yes, Owen. I am. I am assuming she’s not a lunatic. Because she’s not.”

“Well, maybe I’ll scare him away with my manliness.”

“I’m certain you will. With your he-man voice.” I switched off my bedside lamp. “Seriously though, I do give you points. You may not like her as much as I do or even believe her, but you’re certainly helping her.”

He began to rub my back. “It isn’t in my nature to let the people around me feel scared.”

“No. It’s not,” I said, savoring the darkness he had taught me not to fear. Soft, thick darkness. Velvet, loving darkness. “You know, I think you would have been an incredible father, Owen. Probably a much better parent than I.”

From the long silence that followed, I knew he was adjusting to my having raised this topic, so long unmentioned — as if I had now turned on a too-bright light and his pupils needed to contract. “You have a more nurturing nature,” I said. “I can be pretty self-involved, I know. But I’m just self-aware enough to understand how much is missing in me. How very much. Who knows. Maybe it’s all just as well.”

“I don’t think it’s just as well, Gus. It’s not just as well.”

“I don’t mean … I’m just paying you a compliment. I shouldn’t … I put it badly. You’re just very good at taking care of people. That’s all I mean. Better than I am. Even people you don’t much like. I just wanted to say it. You would have been the better parent. And I’m sorry you never got that chance.”

“I’m sorry neither of us did. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you that.”

“No apologies allowed. You know that.”

We lay in silence for a time.

“It’s not always easy, is it?” he said. “Having her here? All that devoted motherhood of hers. She’s like … like some kind of monument to parenting. Like an advertisement for it.”

“I’ve had my moments, I admit.”

“Me too. I’ve had my moments.”

There was another silence.

“But you would have left her in the dust, Gussie,” he said, after some time passed. “As a mother, I mean. You would have been the best mother the world has ever known. Thorns and all. You think you’re all prickles and brambles, but you would have aced it.”

I felt him curve up against me. “Thanks.” I shut my eyes and I raised my knees as he pressed his legs to form with mine. “I’m glad you think so,” I said, forcing myself not to explain all the reasons his assessment couldn’t possibly be true. He kissed the back of my head.

“I love you, Owen,” I said instead.

“And I love you, Augusta Edelman. Gussie. Gus. I always have, you know. And I always will.”

I couldn’t remember the last time we had fallen asleep in an embrace. I couldn’t imagine why we’d ever stopped.

The phone didn’t ring that night.

It rang early in the morning, waking us. “It’s Nora,” Owen said, peering at the display. “Do I answer? How do I explain answering her mother’s phone at seven a.m.?”

“Let it go. She can call her back. It’s too weird.” I sat up. “But that was it, right? There weren’t any other calls?”

He shook his head. Alison’s phone stopped chirping. “Nope.”

“Any theories?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Maybe he knew she was here?”

“Whoever he is,” Owen said. “If there is a he.”

“Maybe it was just, you know, one of those weird things. And it’s over.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t really think she was lying?” I asked. “Do you really?”

“Let’s just hope that’s the end of the whole thing.”

In the kitchen, Alison, already dressed, looked confused to hear there had been no calls.

“Except Nora,” I said, handing her the phone. “About fifteen minutes ago. I think she left a message. It made the message noise.”

I started the coffee, my back to her, as she listened. I took three mugs down from the cabinet.

“Paul was jailed last night,” she said. I turned around. “Drunk driving. Nora had to bail him out.”