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The Space between Contradictions Little know I thy child's father Ofland or sea he's living on. "Silkie" (traditional ballad) I came home from school one day to find the door open and the house quiet. One of my mother's students, a woman named Lara, stood in the living room, hands in her pockets, looking awkward, disoriented , as though she'd just dropped into our living room from another dimension. "Where's my mother?" I asked. "She's gone to New York," the student said. "Nola tried to kill hersel £ She's in a coma." "How?" I asked. "Pills. She OD'd or something. I'm not sure, but your mother told me to meet you. You're going to stay at Norma's tonight." "I can't." "Sure you can," she said. "What do you mean, you can't?" Lara was one ofmy favorites among my mother's students. I liked her because she talked to me as if I were a human being, not some crazy kid, and she always said what was on her mind. She wasn't the most sensitive person in the world, but I liked her directness, and she had a friendly nature that made her easy to get along with. "I just can't go away from my home," I said. "If! do, Nola will die." "What kind of talk is that?" she said, and laughed. "Nola's not going to die, and anyway, it's out ofyour hands. I can't stay with you. I'm going to Arizona for the summer in the morning. You have to stay with Norma." Norma was another friend and sometime student ofmy mother's. Norma was an older student, about my mother's age. She was the widow of a coroner whose hobby it had been to take photos of the people he had performed autopsies on. One time, Norma showed me 308 Nola 309 these photos as though flipping through a family album: a man who had died ofa heart attack, a boy about nine whose snow-laden porch roof had collapsed on him. Of course, I couldn't take my eyes off these photos. But this was not the place I wanted to go while my sister lay in a coma. Still, I was helpless, and eventually Lara talked me into going there. Norma didn't talk to me about Nola. She wanted to talk about cheery things. A carnival was in town and she decided the best medicine for me would be to go with her and a niece about my age, to take my mind offmy sister. I went and I forgot about Nola. I spent the night going from ride to ride, thinking myselfin love with Norma's niece, drunk on the carnival lights, the sounds, the realness ofit all. The next morning I awoke to the telephone ringing beside my bed. I let it ring until it stopped and then I stared at it until I couldn't ignore it any longer. I picked up the phone and at that moment heard my mother tell Norma, "Nola's dead. She died this morning." "What?" I said. "Get offthe line, Robin," my mother said, and I did. I hung up. * * * Over the years, I've asked my mother time and again how Nola died. "Did she kill herself?" I asked, and my mother has always told me no. What happened was that her doctor prescribed too large a dose of Thorazine for her, and her body couldn't handle it. She had kidney failure, went into a coma, and died. She was at my grandmother'S house when this happened, in Long Beach, New York. My grandmother had tried and failed to awaken Nola one morning, and that's when she'd called for an ambulance. This was always the accepted version in my family. Even though she had tried to kill herselfbefore, this time it was pure accident, a mistake , someone else we could blame. I always wondered, as did my brother, why my mother never sued the doctor who prescribed Nola's medication. My mother told me that at the time she couldn't, that it would be too painful, and I understood this. More recently, she's told me that another doctor told her she'd lose a lawsuit because the amount ofThorazine the doctor prescribed was high, yes, but within acceptable limits. Acceptable limits varied from person to person. Still, I always believed that...

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