Free The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

evening. My father must have dialed; she couldn’t anymore, then. I was going to punish her, and let the machine take it, but her voice was so small that I picked up halfway through.
    “Never let the sun go down on an argument,” she said.
    “Because one of us might die in the night,” I said, as I’d replied since I was small. But this time, she laughed, a dry, sad laugh. “One of us just might, Mouse.”

8
    It took my mother years to die. It’s a hard art to master. During the time that she was dying, I was trying to figure out how to live. How to live my own life, that is. I knew it wasn’t right that when asked how I was, I invariably spoke about my mother. Or my father. I had to try, and I did try, to overcome this, to get a life, or two, or three. I’d already come back to Boston from New York for the course at the Museum School; I’d already tried and almost given up the notion of being a self-supporting artist. There was something about turning thirty that made the apartment-share in Jamaica Plain, the sweaty bike messenger housemate, friend of a friend’s ex-boyfriend, with his equipment always blocking the hallway, the intermittent babysitting gigs, slightly too close to unbearable. I’d started the Education degree before my mother got her diagnosis. I was already—mercifully to my parents, I could tell—on my way back to gainful employment.
    Even as I was taking care of my parents, I got very good at practical things over those few years, like the most competent secretaries. I lived multiple lives: in the first, I had every appearance of a modestly accomplished young woman in her early thirties, capable if not interesting, easy to get on with, prompt, efficient, with unnoticeable clothes and a serviceable hairstyle, and a voice a bit higher, perhaps a bit breathier, I was told, than one was led to expect by my frame. A woman without notable surprises.
    But my first life was a masquerade, my Clark Kent life, though in my second I was not a heroine at all. I sometimes hoped that someone out there imagined for me a second life of glamour and drama, as a rock star’s mistress, or an FBI agent. But I wasn’t the sort of person for whom anyone would bother imagining a secret life; and in that second life I was no lover or huntress or martyr, but a daughter, just a dutiful daughter.
    Then there was my third life, small and secret: the life of my dioramas, the vestiges of my artist self.
    You could say that my mother and father, grateful as they manifestly were, didn’t ask me to give up my life. And if I chose to, though I can’t see the logic of my own choice, I’d like to believe it was a purposeful choice and not simply a show of poor time management. A good number of my children are bad at time management. You see it a lot. But you can’t succeed in life unless you get good at it: there’s no point writing the world’s best answer to the first question on the test, if you don’t then leave yourself enough time to write any answers at all to the other questions. You still fail the test. And I worry, in my bleaker hours, that this is what I’ve done. I answered the dutiful daughter question really well; I was aware of doing only a so-so job on the grown-up career front, but I didn’t really care, because there were two big exam questions I wanted to be sure I answered fully: the question of art, and the question of love.

    This was the miracle of my first Shahid year. Never, in all my life, had I thought, as I did then, This is the answer . Not once, but over and over in different configurations, the answer to not one but to every question seemed to come in the course of that year, like music. “On me your voice falls, as they say love should—like an enormous ‘yes.’ ” Philip Larkin on Sidney Bechet: a love poem that is not a love poem. And my love life that was not a love life, but something as consuming, as formidable, as whole.
    My mother was only two years dead, that fall. It felt