Free Black & White by Dani Shapiro

that no one will care.
    Pages and pages of forms to fill out. Paperwork. Clara wheels Ruth to an unoccupied corner of the office and brings her a months old copy of Vogue on which to balance the forms as she checks off various boxes.
    “Crazy,” says Ruth, as she quickly runs down the list. “Diabetes, heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure…no, no, no.” She jabs her pen against the box next to cancer. “Such a stupid thing,” she says. “Nothing’s ever been wrong with me. I’ve never even been in the hospital, except to have you two girls—and now this.”
    Ruth’s eyes are watery from the cold. The tip of her nose is bright pink. She pulls off her fur hat, and beneath it is a silk scarf wrapped elegantly around her head. She wears no makeup, her bare face still surprisingly youthful. Ruth has always looked a decade younger than she is, and even now, even with no hair and pale, almost transparent skin, she is like a china doll. Soft and lovely and breakable.
    “At least it got you here.” She turns to Clara. She reaches over and takes Clara’s hand. Her own hands are warm and dry. “Nothing short of this would have gotten you home, would it?”
    Clara doesn’t answer. Her mother’s touch—the very fact of her hand encased in Ruth’s—is almost more than she can bear. Ruth has been inching toward this—pushing Clara toward a greater intimacy—for the last few days. So, darling, tell me about your life. Not just the broad outline; tell me what it’s really like. Your days—what do you do? How do you feel? Ruth wants to know everything about the last fourteen years, it seems. And your daughter? I would give anything —here she held Clara’s gaze until Clara finally looked away— I would give anything to meet her.
    Clara’s mere presence, unlikely to begin with, is no longer enough. Her mother wants more of her. And now the hand. Foreign. The skin thin and dusty. Clara closes her eyes for a moment, tries to pretend that the hand is Jonathan’s. Or Sam’s. But it isn’t working. She pulls away.
    “Oh, Clara. Please don’t,” Ruth says.
    “I can’t—I can’t help it.”
    Clara starts to cry. Despite everything, despite every cell in her body struggling mightily to keep it together, she’s losing it. Her eyes are flooded—the tears are almost horizontal. She swipes at her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater. She had sworn to herself that she wasn’t going to let her mother see a single feeling. Not rage, not grief, not loss, not a fleeting moment of tenderness. Fourteen years. It’s just goddamned unacceptable.
    In the upholstered chair across from them, a middle-aged woman in a velour sweat suit is thumbing through a copy of People magazine. She resolutely keeps her gaze on the magazine, but her brow creases in sympathy. She thinks Clara’s crying because her mother is ill. Because they’re at the last stop on the cancer train, the office of the Today show doctor.
    “You hate me,” says Ruth.
    “It’s not that,” Clara says, her breath ragged. And it’s true. She doesn’t hate her mother. Not exactly. There may have been a time, a stretch of months or even years—but even then, inside the hate there was something else. Something she didn’t want to look at or think about. A bright glowing thing—a core of softness. Clara never allowed herself near it. She had worked so hard to disconnect. To release herself from the bondage of Ruth. But now it isn’t so easy. Ruth is in front of her: her mother—always her mother, forever her mother. Incandescent, beautiful, fragile, gravely ill. Ruth’s smell hasn’t changed in fourteen years, as if the mingled scents of the darkroom—the developer, stop bath, and fixer—have become a part of her.
    Clara breathes her in. Tries to exhale her out. Tries to hold on to herself. Without even realizing it, she is gripping the sides of her chair.
    “Mrs. Dunne?” A nurse looks around the waiting room. “Ruth Dunne?”
    A few startled