Black & White (14 page)

“All the photographs from the Clara Series—”

Her breath catches. Saying it out loud—saying it to Robin, of all people—makes the book even more real, somehow. All day long, she has walked miles around the city, trying to push it away. She left Ruth’s apartment and walked through the park to the East River, where she stood across from the entrance of Brearley and watched the girls and their mothers come and go. Had she ever simply been one of them, in her navy blue jumper? Or had she always been different? She walked down the streets of the Upper East Side, past newsstands and shops, her childhood haunts. She ate lunch at the soda fountain in the pharmacy on Lexington, summoning the past. Trying to force herself back into it, if only to see if she could survive the journey.

“Calm down, Clara. Take a couple of deep—”

“I can’t.”

“Let’s have a look.” Robin faces her computer screen once again. “Come over here.”

Clara approaches her sister. So Robin hadn’t known. There was some small grace in that, at least. She stands behind Robin and peers into the small screen of her computer as Robin types
RUTH DUNNE
and
CLARA
into Google. A few seconds later, a list appears. There are more than seventy thousand entries. Robin begins to scroll down: first, the online biographies of Ruth, then a series of home pages from Ruth’s galleries—Paris, Madrid, Berlin, London—and then academic papers. Hundreds of them. Art students from all over the place, writing their dissertations about the role of Clara in the work of Ruth Dunne.

“Unbelievable,” says Robin. “I haven’t done this in years.”

Clara’s never been able to bring herself to look at any of this stuff. These perfect strangers who have their opinions—people who have spent years of their lives thinking about Clara and Ruth—studying the photographs as if they might find answers there.

Robin clicks randomly on one, written by a graduate student in women’s studies at Berkeley.
The child acts as both metaphor and provocateur in Dunne’s early work.
Clara skims the page, restless, jumpy.
These images, at first, might be misunderstood as pornographic. But in fact, at its subversive best, Dunne’s work speaks to the profound and collaborative nature of mothering itself.

“I don’t know how you stand this,” Robin says.

“I don’t,” says Clara. “I don’t stand it.”

“There’s nothing here about a book,” Robin says, after a few more dizzying minutes of scrolling down. Robin’s about to close the laptop when Clara remembers the name of Ruth’s German publisher, Steiffel. It floats into her consciousness like a detail from a dream. It sounds huge and looming—a tower, a steeple.

“Let me.” Clara comes around the side of the chair and sits next to Robin. She does a quick search for the publisher, and there it is, what she’s been childishly hoping she wouldn’t find. CLARA. It pops up instantly—the design she saw earlier in the day, the price in euros, the date of publication. December, nine months from now.

“Mom?” Tucker calls from the kitchen. “Mom, I need some help with—”

“Not now,” Robin calls back. “Go ask your father.”

“But he—”

“Just do it!”

Robin folds her hands in her lap, but not before Clara notices that she’s shaking. Her whole body is taut. The tiny muscles in her arms twitch beneath the smooth surface of her skin.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, not looking at Clara.

“You didn’t do anything,” Clara says.

“I know. I know, but—”

“Mom?” Another child’s voice pierces the moment. “I forgot that I need my guitar tomorrow, at school.”

“I’m busy, Harrison,” Robin calls. “You’re going to have to wait a few minutes.”

She turns now and looks directly at Clara.

“What are you going to do now?”

“What do you mean?”

But Clara knows. She knows exactly what Robin means. She can hear Robin’s younger voice—fourteen years younger, to be exact—as if it has been trapped inside of Clara all these years.
You’re leaving, aren’t you? You’re not coming back. How can you do this?
It has never gone away. None of it has. The past is alive inside of them—it will die only when they do, and maybe not even then.

“I haven’t thought about it—” she falters. And then she realizes that it is, in fact, all she’s been thinking about as she’s circled the city. A knowledge, just out of reach. She’s already gone, in fact. Back to Maine, back to the life she never should have left, not for a minute. She’s brought about Jonathan’s fury at her, Sammy’s sadness and confusion—for what? What had she been thinking, that it really could be different?

“Come on, Clara.”

“I’m not like you, Robin, I don’t just—”

“You’re leaving.”

A long pause, a free fall.

“Yes.”

Clara hadn’t noticed—hadn’t allowed herself to notice—how much Robin has grown to look like their father. She has Nathan’s gray-green eyes, Nathan’s strong jaw. Clara wishes she could wrap her arms around her sister and hold her.

“Is that it, then?” Robin’s face tightens further.

“Yes,” Clara says softly.

Robin’s cheeks redden. “Please. I know this is bad,” she says. “And you have every right to be furious at Ruth—but I’ve been dealing with her for so goddamned long by myself—”

“I just can’t,” Clara says. “Especially now, after I started to—”

She breaks off, shaking her head.

“What? Started to what?” Robin stands up now and moves a few steps back. As if she can’t bear to sit so close to Clara.

“To let myself feel something for her again. To believe that maybe—”

“She is who she is,” Robin says. “I’ve known that forever.”

“Well, maybe it’s less complicated for you,” says Clara.

Robin blinks hard.

“What did you just say?”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“You think my relationship with Ruth has been—uncomplicated?”

“No, that’s not what I—”

“Fuck you,” Robin says, her tone improbably soft.

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” Robin says. “It’s all about you, Clara. It’s always been all about you.”

“No, that’s not it!”

Clara stands up. She can’t afford to be sitting down with Robin towering over her like this. Robin’s hands twitch at her sides, and for a split second Clara thinks her sister might slap her. But then all that rage seems to slide off—Clara can almost see it puddling on the floor around Robin—and what is left, instead, looks like grief.

“I spent my whole life”—Robin’s mouth contorts—“by myself. Mom was always taking you away. You spent hours in the studio—”

“I didn’t want to be doing that,” Clara interrupts. “I didn’t want—”

“And then in the country,” Robin goes on. “You’d be gone all afternoon. What did you think I was doing, especially on the weekends when Dad was away? I was alone in that goddamned house—”

“She was torturing me,” Clara says softly. “I hated it.”

“She was paying attention to you.”

“Mommy?”

Elliot appears in the archway of the living room, rubbing her eyes. She’s holding a well-worn stuffed kitten, and her cheeks are creased from her pillow.

“Oh, Ellie, would you ask Daddy or Edjinea to put you back to bed, honey? Mommy’s busy.”

Elliot turns and pads back down the hall, looking for her father.

“God, you’d think that for once I could have a little space.” Robin bites her cuticle, then stares at her fingernails. She’s trying hard not to cry. “Please, Clara. Stay a little while longer.”

It costs Robin something to ask, and Clara knows it.

“Listen,” Clara says. “I was trying to let go of it—trying to tell myself that it all happened a long time ago—”

“And it did!” Robin interrupts.

“But now she’s bringing it back,” Clara says. “It’s all coming back. Don’t you see?”

“Please,” Robin repeats. Her mouth quivering.

“I can’t.”

Something shuts down in Robin’s eyes. Clara sees it happening—as if two tiny window shades have been pulled down. Her whole face becomes opaque. Robin gives a nod, then a small tight smile.

“Okay, then,” she says. “When’s your flight?”

Chapter Five

T
HE TAXI
from Bangor drops Clara off in front of the Bar Harbor YMCA. The trucks and SUVs in the parking lot are in their usual spots. Mary Ann Rowe’s metallic blue Toyota with its
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
bumper sticker is next to Ali Mulvey’s white Land Cruiser, so caked with mud and snow that it appears gray. Susanna Haber’s Lexus—the only luxury SUV in the lot—is parked halfway into the yellow line of a handicapped space even though there’s plenty of room around it. If Clara bothered to look, she knows she would see keys dangling from the ignitions of most of the cars and open handbags resting on passenger seats. They all do this, the mothers. They even leave their engines running sometimes, as they dash into the Y to pick up their kids after swim practice.

Four-thirty on a Wednesday, and everything is exactly as it was before Clara left. She can hear the sound of splashing, the shriek of the coach’s whistle as she walks past the front desk to the double doors leading to the Olympic-sized pool. She inhales sharply. The warm damp air stings the insides of her nostrils. The air around the pool smells slightly of chlorine.

The last two and a half weeks close around her—constricting her movements—and for a moment she stops. Tries to calm down.
You’re home now. You’re home now. You’re home.
Fourteen years—what hubris, what staggering innocence—to think that those years would double and redouble, that she would live out her whole life as she intended. As if her past could be chopped away. She remembers once, at Sawyer’s Market, ordering a butterflied leg of lamb. She watched as the butcher carefully sliced away the fat, his knife as precise as a scalpel. When it came time for him to flatten the meat, he turned to Clara with a wink.
Thinking of my mother,
he said, as he grabbed a meat cleaver. He raised the cleaver high and started pounding on the meat, whacking it until it quivered under the thick metal blade. A vein popped out in his forehead from the effort.

Thinking of my mother.
As Clara pushes the doors open, the sound of splashing grows louder. The thin voices of girls (Sammy!) echo off the tile walls and ceiling. The humid air, usually oppressive, hits her not at all unpleasantly. Often she finds it hard to breathe in here, but today—after the taxi to LaGuardia, the hour-long flight to Bangor, the two-hour car service back to the island—her pores open up to the heat. She wants to sweat New York out of her system. Feel her mother and her sister—and the rest of them, Kubovy, even the hospice nurse—dripping out of her. Detoxified. Gone.

Where’s Sammy? Clara’s need to see Sammy is frantic, physical. She scans the pool for Sammy’s small head in its bathing cap and goggles. There she is, poised to dive into the pool at the far end—the long muscles in her thighs tensed, arms angled perfectly over her head. It’s all Clara can do not to lurch toward her daughter, dive into the pool, and grab Sammy’s wiry little body, breathe into the back of her sweet wet neck.

Two and a half weeks. A fucking eternity. And for what?

The moms are sitting on the bleachers, surrounded by piles of towels, down jackets, snow boots, knapsacks, brown paper bags filled with snacks for the ride home: juice boxes, single-serving yogurts, and packages of peanut butter crackers. This group of women has been together for years, loosely formed by the fact that their daughters are swimmers. Clara has always thought of them as
the moms.
As if she herself were apart from them. As if she herself has not perched on these bleachers, year after year, making small talk about play dates, chorus, the need for a new tennis coach.

Laurel Connolly spots her at the door and waves. Her daughter Emily has been swimming with Sam since kindergarten.

“Hey there, stranger!” Laurel moves a pile of towels out of the way and makes room for Clara next to her on the bleacher. She leans over and gives Clara a hug. “How are you? I’ve been thinking about you so much.”