Black & White by Dani Shapiro

says. “The one who had lung cancer—”
    “It was caught earlier.” Zamitsky shakes his head. Clara’s beginning to think he regrets having gone on national television. “She was extremely, unusually lucky.”
    Clara sees the fight go out of her mother’s body, almost as if a shadow—the warrior part of Ruth that has served her so well—steps away from Ruth’s physical self and leaves the room. Ruth’s shoulders cave. She slumps down in her wheelchair. Her face falls, aging in an instant.
    “That’s it, then,” she says softly.
    “There’s a lot we can do to make you comfortable,” says Zamitsky.
    “What’s going to happen to me?”
    Zamitsky isn’t shying away from this. He hasn’t backed off. He’s looking at Ruth directly, his face no more than a foot from hers. Like a priest in a confessional, he is creating a sacred space, a space where hard things can be said.
    “What exactly are you asking?” Zamitsky leans forward.
    “How am I going to die?”
    “Eventually your brain will stop telling your heart to beat—or it will stop telling your lungs to breathe. Your body will undergo a brief and painless systemic failure,” says Zamitsky. He keeps his tone even. He’s reporting the news.
    Clara moves closer to Ruth. She stands behind her and puts her hands on Ruth’s bony shoulders. Rests them there, just like that.
     
     
     
    That evening, they gather around Robin’s dining table. Clara would have preferred the impersonal din of a restaurant, the distraction of waiters offering wine lists, busboys depositing baskets of bread, pouring olive oil into small dipping dishes. Instead, there are the children. Two nephews and a niece—strangers to her—who keep staring solemnly at Clara from across the table. They have first names that sound like last names: Harrison and Tucker. The girl is called Elliot. At six, she’s the youngest, but still she sits with perfect posture in her chair—Clara can almost hear Robin say like a little lady —as she lifts her cloth napkin off the table and smooths it across her lap.
    Clara has been trying to get to know Robin’s kids. Her third day in New York, she went to a toy store on Lexington Avenue and bought them each gifts she couldn’t really afford—gifts she wouldn’t just go out and buy Sam—video games for Harrison and Tucker, a karaoke machine for Elliot. She has asked them each questions about school, teachers, friends—all the usual stuff that eventually works to get kids talking. But still they continue to look at her with polite disregard. What have they heard about her, over the years?
    “You shouldn’t have gone to such trouble, sweetheart,” Ruth says to Robin, as the first course is served by one of the staff. Clara is having a hard time keeping count of just how many people her sister has in her employ.
    “Oh, I didn’t,” Robin says airily. “Edjinea is a fabulous cook. She can do anything Brazilian, of course, but she also follows recipes.”
    “Delicious,” pronounces Robin’s husband, Ed. The puree of pea soup is garnished with tiny bits of earthy-looking matter that turn out, upon tasting, to be black trumpet mushrooms. A delicacy, out of season.
    Clara feels like she’s walked into an alternate version of her life. This is the path not taken. If she hadn’t left home at eighteen, would she have been sitting at this dining table all along? Would she have graduated from Brearley, gone to an Ivy League school, carved out a career for herself in—what? law—like her father and Robin? Not likely. Something in the art world? Impossible, it would have killed her. No. Her job in life has been to survive. And that, she has done. She has done that brilliantly. She’s here, isn’t she? She has a family of her own, doesn’t she? She’s even managing to survive being in the same room as her mother again—something she had never thought possible. Clara realizes that she’s gripping her soupspoon too tightly. When she releases