In Sight of Stars(28)

I roll my gaze to the window. It looks clear and blue outside, making me think of those stories people tell about 9/11. That it was perfectly sunny that day, with a deceptively clear blue sky. Not a single sign of the threat to come. Just like now. No sign of impending disaster. But I know better.

“Or if you’re not up for that, you could always head down to the family room,” Nurse Carole adds. “At any rate,” she says, nodding at the tray with my pill cup, “there’s some toast and yogurt with granola in there in case you don’t have time to make it to the dining hall. You really shouldn’t take all that medication on an empty stomach. I’m here until noon if you need anything.”

“Okay, thank you.” I swallow the pills down. As she’s about to leave, I call, “Hey, can I ask you something?”

She stops and turns. “Sure.”

“Do you know the nun … the … the one that…” I stammer, not sure how to describe her. Is she a nurse? A social worker? A volunteer? “The one that works here?”

Nurse Carole tilts her head curiously, then says, “You mean Sister Agnes Teresa? Yes, of course, why?”

“No reason,” I say, feeling relieved. When she leaves, I take a bite of toast and stare out the window. My view is unobstructed. The excavator has moved elsewhere.

I close my eyes and picture my mother, the way she was a long time ago. The way I remembered her last night, with Dad and me, playing board games. I had forgotten her that way. Before. Because there was a before, not just before Dad died, but when she was younger, less serious, less perfect. More East Village walk-up than marble-floored apartment on Madison Avenue. Less material. Less Ice Queen. Somewhere in the back of my brain she exists like that still, in some fuzzy recess, scratchy and faded, like she’s been put through some filter on Instagram.

But she did. She was. We were. I can see us there. All three of us. Our family. We’re in pajamas, sitting together on the pilled green couch in Dad’s first apartment on St. Marks Place. The one she moved into after they got married. The apartment we still lived in while Dad finished law school at night. Before he got the suit job at the big white-shoe law firm, and we moved uptown, and the money rolled in … and he stopped painting altogether.

I can see us there. My mother, smiling and laughing, and me, too. It makes me want to cry. It makes me want to hate her.

I open my eyes, desperate to see the excavator, its solid, massive self, head nodded down, teeth ready to chomp into soil, raze the earth. Erase and obliterate everything that’s come before.

And here’s something else I want to erase, something that eats at me because I hadn’t seen it until just now: On that shabby green couch in that small apartment (or in the kitchen later that night, or the park six months later, or even in that Madison Avenue apartment when we first moved in), it’s not my mother who is unhappy. My mother is warm, and cheerful, and smiling.

I’m smiling, too.

The only one not smiling is my father.

*

I knock and knock until Dad finally opens the studio door. “I’m ready,” I say, slipping in. “Can we go?”

Dad is still in his pajama pants, no shirt. Even when he’s sleepy and half dressed, he’s fresh and clean and meticulous. The green and white stripes of the pants frame a perfect flat stomach, his ab muscles tightening as he leans to close the door behind us. My father is skinny and in shape. Handsome and strong. He goes to the gym religiously, and, even when he can’t, he does at least one hundred crunches every morning. Plus pull-ups on the bar that hangs over their bedroom door. And most mornings he runs by the Reservoir, hours before I even wake up for school.

My mother gets annoyed. “Must you be such a prima donna, Mark?” I once heard her ask, but she’s one to talk. She’s more obsessed with looking good than he is.

My friends have mothers who wear sweats and jeans. Not mine, though. Not anymore. Lately, she’s always fixed up. Like she needs to be perfect. As if she’s going on a date. Or a photographer might arrive at our door.

My dad dresses nice for work, but on the weekends, or the rare occasion he doesn’t have to work, he’s dressed in joggers and a T-shirt, holed up in his studio to paint. It makes me happy when he is, because he seems most happy there. Painting. Just being himself. Plus, sometimes, I get to paint with him.

The studio is small, modest, with white walls, a clutter of paintings and canvases, and a big window with northern exposure. Dad told me that northern exposure is the best kind of light a painter can have.

Paint, brushes, rags, and color-splattered palettes fill every space on the folding tables that line one wall. The room smells like his aftershave mixed with turpentine.

The painting on the easel now, the one he’s been working on for months, is dark and gloomy, ugly. I don’t like it. I prefer when he does big sunny paintings with sunflowers and fruit trees and wheat blowing in fields. This one shows a wooden table in low light, stretching across a dark, old-fashioned room. There’s a big bowl of fruit on the table. Apples, pears, oranges, plums. But the fruit is bruised and half eaten, seeds and meaty cores scattered about. Several pieces have fallen to the floor, as if someone took a bite and rejected them. Flowers are scattered, too, some fresh and bright, but others dead and molting, shedding their brown leaves.

I glance at the table where he has the actual still life set up that he’s working from, but the bowl there holds only a few normal-looking red apples and tangerines.