Black & White (17 page)

“So, seriously,” Jonathan says, “why are you looking at the map?”

Clara shakes her head. Slightly worried now. Is there any possibility that this guy has been sent by Ruth? He doesn’t look like a private investigator—in Clara’s mind, private investigators wear poorly cut suits and have potbellies—but you never know.

“I’ve been watching you,” he goes on. “You’ve been sitting at this table every day staring at that thing.”

“So?”

“So, nothing.” He stops. “Sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me. Sorry.”

“No problem,” Clara says. But she doesn’t entirely mean it. Maybe she should get out of here. She pushes her chair back, the wooden legs scraping loudly against the floor—ready to flee, to race down the aisles of this cavernous room and out the glass doors of the library into the bright sunlight.

“Wait,” he says. “I didn’t mean to ask so many questions.”

“Okay.”

Clara pulls at a hangnail on the side of her thumb.

“Do you want to get a cup of coffee?”

She looks at him. “That’s another question,” she says.

Jonathan laughs. And when she hears his laugh—the way it seems to bubble all the way up from somewhere deep in his belly—she feels herself relax.

“I’m here on a fellowship in the geology department,” offers Jonathan.

Ah. That makes sense.

“And you?”

“And me, what?”

“You’re a student?”

She doesn’t answer. Stuck. She can’t tell him the truth—but something stops her from being able to lie. The library is so quiet that she can hear the ticking of the clock above the reference desk. Again, the panic rises inside of her.

“Did my mother send you?” The words fly from her lips.

“What?” He looks genuinely taken aback. “Your
mother
?”

She feels herself turn bright red.

“Sorry. Never mind.”

“Your
mother
?” Jonathan repeats. “Who the hell is your mother, and why would she—I mean, what are you saying?”

“Never mind!”

Clara wants to flee, but something keeps her rooted to the spot. Maybe it’s her loneliness. Maybe she’s been so isolated these past months she doesn’t mind talking to a perfect stranger. Who is he, anyway? She doesn’t know him. What does he mean, he’s been watching her? She’s never seen him before.

“Come for coffee. Or lunch, even. I don’t bite.”

His eyes are the green of a pond. They remind Clara of daybreak in Hillsdale, the way she and Robin would crouch at the water’s edge, looking for tadpoles.

“No—I can’t.”

But still, neither of them moves.

“You’re not a student here, are you,” Jonathan says. More a statement than a question. How does he know? What has given her away?

“No,” Clara says. Her voice is almost inaudible. “I’m not.” A few small words, and relief washes over her. Finally, to say it—to someone other than Tamara Stein. She’s tired. Exhausted from the sheer effort of day-to-day survival. She has been existing on falafel and burnt coffee—university food—and sleeping only a few hours a night on Tamara’s floor.

Jonathan extends a hand to Clara. And—much to her surprise—she takes it. She watches herself as if from a great distance, as if she were not even herself but, rather, a character in a play.
Here she walks out of the library with a strange man. Here she sits at a café table and allows him to buy her lunch. Here she knows—from this very first moment, she knows—that something has shifted. She is eighteen years old and her life is beginning again.

D
INNERTIME
at the Brodeurs. Spread before them are unfamiliar casseroles and Tupperware containers—food that has been left on their doorstep by friends and neighbors who assume that Jonathan couldn’t possibly manage dinner. Here, Sylvia Grausman’s famous beef stew in a cast-iron Crock-Pot. There, glazed carrots and parsnips from the Habers in disposable plastic. Single-sized servings of macand-cheese wrapped in foil.

“Well, you haven’t been starving, I see,” Clara says. Her vision of frozen pizzas and microwaved popcorn had clearly been off the mark.

“I’ve had to turn them away,” says Jonathan, chewing. “The only thing I could figure is, they’re angling for a discount at the shop.”

“Daddy!” Sammy exclaims.

“Jonathan!” Such a cynical thing for him to say. And so unlike him. He never thinks anyone has an ulterior motive, unless proven otherwise.

“Well, Tess Martin did manage to work the topaz necklace with the tourmaline clasp into our conversation.”

“She didn’t!”

“She did.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

It almost feels like a normal evening. The easy banter. Sammy’s bare feet warming themselves under Clara’s thighs, wedged in there like she’s done since she was two years old. Zorba under the table—naughty dog—his tail wagging madly, foraging for scraps. Jonathan, his chair tipped back on its hind legs, arms folded behind his head. Clara can almost hear him thinking:
my girls.
He wants nothing more than what is right in front of him. No striving, no yearning for paths not taken. This is everything—his lovely complicated wife, his precocious sweet daughter, his shop—the Tess Martins of the world notwithstanding.

Maybe, just maybe, this world Clara has built will close up around the gaping hole of her absence, smoothing it over. A wound becomes a scab becomes a scar becomes—nearly invisible. Clara holds on to the wish tightly, like a child. Maybe these crazy weeks can fade away. No real damage done. And Ruth—Ruth is in New York, almost four hundred miles from here, probably deep into her late-afternoon nap. The brown eyes drifting beneath closed lids. The clawlike hands resting on top of the soft white sheets.

Sammy pushes her plate back.

“May I be excused?”

An unusual request from Sammy. She never leaves the table before they do; she wants to be with her parents all the time. Besides, she’s barely touched her dinner. Macaroni and cheese—her favorite—and she hasn’t taken a single bite.

“Aren’t you hungry, Sam?”

“No.”

“Come on, honey, stay with us. I haven’t seen you in so long—”

But that thing comes over Sam’s face again, the slight hardening that Clara saw at the pool. Self-protective. An angry edge.

Clara tries to catch Jonathan’s eye, but he’s focused on his beef stew. She feels like she’s been gone months, not weeks.

“Is there anything you want to talk about, Sammy?” Clara asks.

A scary question, but she has to ask it.

Sam just glares at her. Under the bright yellow lights, her cheeks look sallow, hollowed out. She’s lost weight, Clara realizes with a start. Sam was always thin but now, even in the bulky Yale sweatshirt, she’s pale and bony. Dark circles under her eyes—no nine-year-old should have dark circles. Has she been sleeping? Eating? How did Clara not see this at the pool? Of course—she was looking for other things. She was looking for the happiness and surprise on her little girl’s face, herself reflected there as a good mother.

“Do you want to talk?” Clara repeats. Soft, insistent. Trying to quiet the hammering anxiety that has started up inside of her.

“No,” Sam says, her mouth tight.

“Okay,” Clara says. She doesn’t want to push things—not right now. “You may be excused.”

Sammy takes off like a shot. Her footsteps pound up the creaky old stairs to the second floor. She races down the hall to her bedroom; her door slams. One of the things Clara has always loved about this ancient, drafty house is that she always knows where everyone is. But right now—right now there is no comfort to be found in the thought of Sammy throwing herself on her bed. Covering her head with a pillow, the way she does when she gets upset.

“What’s going on?” Clara asks. “What the hell?”

Jonathan is sitting there, just watching her. He is infuriatingly calm.

“Say something!”

But he doesn’t.

“Jesus,” Clara says. She gets up from the table and looks for an open bottle of wine in the kitchen. There aren’t any, so she pulls a bottle from the wine rack without even looking at it. The corkscrew is halfway in before she realizes it’s a good bottle, an expensive Oregon Pinot Noir. A gift from one of Jonathan’s summer people.
Oh, who the fuck cares.

“I told you,” Jonathan says, very quietly.

She whirls around, corkscrew in hand, and looks at him.

“You told me what?”

“That things were getting bad around here.”

“But you didn’t say—” She falters. He didn’t say what? That Sam was becoming unreachable? That she had stopped eating? What good would the specifics have done, except to make Clara feel even more torn than she already was? Jonathan had been trying—impossible as it was—to protect her. And it had cost him dearly. She could see the price all over his exhausted face.

“Look.” She sits back down at the table and hands him a glass of wine. “I’m done there, Jon. In New York.”

She can’t bring herself to say Ruth’s name out loud.

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did your mother—”

She shakes her head. “Please. Not now.”

His hand comes down hard on the table, rattling the dishes and glasses, scaring her.

“You can’t do that!” he shouts.

“Ssshh. We don’t want Sammy to—”

“No, Clara, you can’t cut things off, just because—”

“You don’t know anything about it!”

She’s yelling now too. Forgetting, for a moment, about Sam upstairs.

“That’s because you won’t let me in!” Jonathan says. “It’s like a fucking fortress in there.” He waves at her whole body, his hands flailing, dismissive.

She goes cold, her blood pooling away from her extremities. She knows what he’s saying. She knows, even if he doesn’t.

“That’s a low blow, Jonathan.” Her voice steely. She can find the strength inside herself—she knows she can. She always has.

“That’s not what I—” Jonathan reaches for her hand but she pulls away. This has gone on forever—since the beginning, or certainly since Sam’s birth. Jonathan thinks she’s closed off. Shut down.
You won’t let me in.
His hand on her body, tracing her limbs, fingers gently prying, exploring, searching for the hidden places. And she—there’s only so far that she can let him go before she stops him. Grabs his hand and holds it tight.
No, honey. I just can’t—not tonight.
He can’t know how scary it is, how many locked doors there are inside of her. They don’t really talk about it—although every few years he broaches the subject—because where is there to go with it, really? Jonathan—no one would believe this, but it’s true—Jonathan is the only man she’s ever been with.

“Let’s talk about Sam,” she says.

Jonathan nods slowly. Here they are again, pushing it all away.

“She’s awfully thin,” she says.

“Yes.”

“And Laurel Connolly told me that she lied—at school. She told her girlfriends that I’m sick—”

“What?”

“—and that’s the reason why—”

“Christ.”

“She must be really angry at me,” Clara says, “to come up with such a thing.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Jonathan says. He empties his glass of wine, then pours another. “I think she had to make something up because she was terrified. She doesn’t understand, Clara. Her mother just up and left home for more than two weeks with no explanation.”

“Okay,” Clara says. Above their heads, she can hear Sammy moving around her room. Sweet, beautiful, wonderful Sammy. “I’ll talk to her.”

“When?” Jonathan isn’t going to let her off the hook.

“Soon,” Clara says. A dive into thin air. “I promise.”