She works carefully, methodically, mark by tiny mark, hundreds of thousands of them, which when she’s finished will cohere into what others will see as a single image, this one of a tree at the edge of a field. Anyone else would say that her drawings are realistic representations, but to her they are fundamentally abstract, each one a collection of lines, of lights and darks and shapes and shadow. She keeps her head low to the paper as she draws, looking up only to sharpen or change her pencil, thinking of nothing but her work. It is her favorite time of day for this reason; everything—the heat, the war, her worries, the world—recedes, leaving her entirely to herself.
This was how she intended to spend her life—as an artist. She had just enrolled in the Corcoran School of Art, in Washington, D.C., when she met Polly, who was there as a legal intern, and she dropped out to follow him south when his internship was up. She doesn’t dislike the south, but even after thirteen years it still feels foreign to her, and as she goes about her duties as daughter-in-law, mother, wife, she has the distinct sense that there is some other version of herself living the life she meant to have.
She changes pencils—dark to light—as, in the image, tree meets sky, and she has barely begun the fine, faint crosshatch of a cloud when the alarm clock on the table jars her with its sudden shrill chime. She turns the alarm off, surprised as she always is by how quickly the minutes pass when she is working. She rises from her chair. Out the window and across the patio, she can see Polly at his desk, and it strikes her, seeing him from behind, how gray his hair has become. It is strange to find themselves beginning to grow old.
In a moment, Nell turns back into the kitchen. From a drawer beneath the counter she takes a needle, plunger, and glass tube, into which she drops a small, white pill of morphine from a bottle in the cabinet. Deftly, she inserts the plunger and draws water into the tube from a sanitized supply in the fridge, then shakes the tube vigorously until the pill dissolves.
Though once these things might have made Nell shudder, she has become expert in giving injections, in bathing Mother’s papery skin and dressing her brittle body. She performs these tasks with swift detachment, and it often occurs to her how familiar it is, to handle another body—to thread an arm through a sleeve or to wash behind an ear—it’s just as it was with a toddling Gabe.
She carries the tube and needle with her down the darkened hallway. Quietly, she opens the door to Mother’s bedroom and steps inside. The room smells of dust, breath, and old books. Mother is asleep, the lump of her body barely perceptible beneath the bedsheets. Nell crosses the room and turns on the bedside light; the old woman stirs, but she does not open her eyes.
Over the past five years, there have been successive strokes, each one incapacitating Mother further, rendering her deaf, crippling her left arm, then the left side of her face. She has been ravaged, whittled near to bone. When Nell thinks of the hours Mother used to spend in the garden, pulling up henbit and mallow by the roots, and when she thinks of the woman’s endless thirst for Gilbey’s gin and her cackling sense of humor, this seems a particularly awful way to go, blow by blow by blow. Nell quietly hopes that the next stroke will be the last.
She reaches for Mother’s arm, pinches the skin between her fingers so that the needle will not hit bone. The needle slides in almost too easily. She slowly depresses the plunger, thoughts of death inevitably leading her mind back to Willie Jones. If the boy has to die, she thinks, at least it will be quick. But the thought provides less comfort than unease; and the anger that, while she was drawing, had settled to a simmer begins again to boil.