Dedication
For A., C., and W., who continue to instruct me well in the occasional heartbreak and lifelong joy of being a mother.
And for C. and S. The next generation.
Epigraph
I’m sorry.
I love you.
Thank you.
Please forgive me.
—Ho‘oponopono prayer, phrases spoken in any order, for reconciliation and forgiveness
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
—Jane Kenyon, “Happiness”
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part 1
1. A Familiar Road
2. Intimate Strangers
3. Some Tree
4. Fixer-Upper
5. Where the Happy People Lived
6. Who Should We Call?
7. One Small Step for Man
8. Like Someone Just Ran You Over with a Truck
9. A Blue-Eyed Boy and a Good Dog
10. Wish I Had a River
11. A Red-Headed Man
12. The Money Part
13. Here’s Your Daughter
14. Second Fiddle
15. Ships in the Night
16. A First Baseman’s Wife
17. Black Ice
18. People You Care About Start Dying
19. A Web-Footed Boy
20. This Was Her Artwork
21. Over the Coals
22. My Body Keeps Wanting to Be Bad
23. A Non-Comic Strip
24. The Wieniawski Polonaise
25. Sex in the Air
26. The Amazing Catch
27. Hawaii Ho
28. The No-Cry Pledge
29. Sometimes Even Breast Milk Isn’t Enough
30. Barbie Shoe
31. A Career in Dry-Cleaning
32. Bûche de Noël
33. He Got Hold of the Reddi-Wip
34. You Have to Make Compromises
35. Family Values
36. Female Party Guest Number Four
37. No More Cork People
38. Old Wonderful Life
39. Pocket of Stones
40. That Moment Has Passed
41. We Are the Children
42. Ball. Egg. Dinosaur.
43. Bad Things, Good People
44. Call Me Al
45. Happy Anniversary
46. Nothing Matters Anymore
47. Shavasana
48. Riding Without a Helmet
49. Zero Gravity
50. A Million Pieces
51. A Marriage Not Long Enough to Bear Peaches
Part 2
52. Faulty O-Ring
53. Beyond Valentines
54. Why Would You Blow Up Our Life?
55. A New Mattress
56. I Will Always Love You
57. Crazyland Dead Ahead
58. Code of Silence
59. A Waterbed
60. Never a Good Time
61. Just Like in The Sound of Music
62. Dream Girl
63. Mr. Fun
64. Goodbye Goodnight Moon
65. You Don’t Live There Anymore
66. A New Human Being
67. The Last Bath
68. Not Their Half Brother
69. No More Onions in the Bed
70. The Reason for Every Single Bad Thing
71. I Want to Go Home
72. My Mother Just Hit Me
73. Perfect Christmas
74. The Three Amigos
75. The Advantages of Forgetting
76. The Last Cubs Fan
77. Reply Hazy, Try Again
78. Like Dating Your Own Children
79. What It Meant to Be Real
80. The Cork People
81. Can You Forgive Him?
82. Crazies Out There
83. I Would Have Taken Good Care of You
84. Car Wreck in Paris
85. The Life of Some Whole Other Person
86. The Red Carpet
87. I Won’t Be Coming Home
88. Happy, or Close Enough
89. No Big Drama, No Sleepless Nights
90. I Met Somebody
91. A Teenager in the House
92. Another Mother Moves Out
93. She Doesn’t Count to Ten
94. Even Better Than You Thought It Would Be
95. The White House in His Sights
96. Crash
97. Invitation to a Wedding
98. Together Again, Whatever That Means
99. One of the Great Things About Rocks
100. You Who Are on the Road
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Joyce Maynard
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
When a writer chooses, as the basis of her novel, elements that resemble experiences in her own life, it’s not surprising for readers to imagine that the book in their hands may not be a work of fiction so much as a fictionalized account of real-life experiences. The better a writer may do her job, the more a reader is apt to suppose that the events unfolding on the pages of a book may have actually occurred.
The characters whose story I chose to tell here are people who emerged from a place I love: my imagination. What is real are the themes I’ve returned to many times over the course of my long career: home, the making of a family, the costly experience—for children, and for their parents—of divorce and its aftermath.
A writer is apt to tell many stories over the years, but it may well be that her themes change very little, if at all. Long ago, in a novel I wrote called Where Love Goes, I explored a marriage and a divorce, as I have done once again in these pages. In a few instances, actual scenes that take place in that early novel appear, in somewhat different form, in this new piece of work.
I didn’t know I was revisiting those scenes until a reader of a draft of this novel pointed out a certain resemblance to that earlier one. I was surprised, myself, when I learned that I’d returned to such apparently similar territory. What differs most profoundly between that work—written when I was just past age forty—and this one, written more than a quarter century later, are not simply the characters and events, but the author who created them. Same person. Altered perspective.
My central character this time around, like the author who chose to bring her to life on the page, is a woman who finally—not without struggle—comes to understand the meaning of letting go of old grievances and bitterness. At the end of the day, this is a novel about the importance of asking forgiveness, and offering it. It’s a lesson that comes with age, perhaps—an invaluable lesson no matter when it is acquired.
Prologue
Toby was just a baby—Alison four years old, Ursula not yet three—the first time they launched the cork people. After that it became their annual tradition.
Eleanor had always loved how, when the snow melted every spring, the water in the brook down the road would race so fast you could hear it from their house, crashing over the rocks at the waterfall. A person could stand there for an hour—and in the old days before children, when she would come to this pl
ace alone, she had done that—staring into the water, studying the patterns it made as the brook narrowed and widened again, the way it washed over the smaller stones and splashed against the large ones. If you felt like it, you might trace the course of a single stick or leaf, some remnant of last summer, as it made its way downstream, tossed along by the current.
One time she and the children had spotted a child’s sneaker caught up in the racing water. Another time Alison had tossed a pine cone in the brook and the four of them—Eleanor, Alison, Ursula, and baby Toby—had watched it bob along, disappearing into a culvert but showing up again, miraculously, on the other side. They had followed that pine cone along the edges of the brook until it disappeared around a bend.
“If only we had a boat,” Alison said, looking out at the racing water, “we could float down the stream.” She was thinking about the song Eleanor used to sing to them in the car.
“Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” she sang now, in her sweet, high voice.
Life is but a dream.
When they got home, she was still talking about it, so Eleanor suggested that they make a miniature boat and launch it just below the falls. With little passengers along for the ride.
“We could make them out of Popsicle sticks,” she said. “Or corks.”
Cork, because it floated. Cork people.
Every year after that, usually on the first warm weekend in March, Eleanor laid out the craft supplies on the kitchen table—pipe cleaners, glue gun, string, pushpins, Magic Markers, and corks saved from a year’s worth of wine, which wasn’t all that much in those days.
They constructed their boats out of balsa wood, with sails attached made from scraps of outgrown pajama bottoms and dresses. For Alison, the future engineer, it was the boats that occupied her attention more than the passengers. But Ursula took the greatest care drawing faces on the corks, gluing on hair and hats. Even Toby, young as he was, participated. Every cork person got a name.
One was Crystal—Ursula’s suggestion. She had wanted a sister with the name but, failing that, gave it to a cork person. One was Rufus—not a cork person, in fact, but a cork dog. They named one Walt, after their neighbor, and another was named after the daughter of a man on their father’s softball team, who got cancer and died just before they went back to school.
When they were done making their cork people and the vessels to carry them, the children and Eleanor carried them down to a spot they’d staked out, flat enough for all four of them to stand, and one by one, they would lower their boats and the passengers they carried, attached with rubber bands, into the fast-moving waters.
Goodbye, Crystal. Bye, Rufus. See you later, Walt.
They were on their own now, and there was nothing anyone could do to assist them in the perilous journey ahead.
It was like parenthood, Eleanor thought, watching the little line of bobbing vessels taking off through the fast-moving waters. You made these precious people. You hovered over them closely, your only goal impossible: to keep them out of harm’s way. But sooner or later you had to let the cork people set off without you, and once you did there would be nothing for it but to stand on the shore or run along the edge yelling encouragement, praying they’d make it.
The boats took off bobbing and dancing. Eleanor and the children ran along the mossy bank, following their progress. They ran hard to keep up, Eleanor holding tight to Toby’s hand. Toby, the one who could get away and into trouble faster than anyone.
The journey wasn’t easy for the cork people. Some of the boats in which the children had placed them got stuck along the way in the tall grass along the side of the brook. Some disappeared without a trace. If a boat capsized, bearing one of her precious cork people, Ursula (the dramatic one) was likely to let out a piercing cry.
“Oh, Jimmy!” she called out. “Oh, Crystal!” “Evelyn, where are you?” “Be careful, Walt!”
Some cork people never made it through the culvert. Some fell off the vessel that was carrying them on a wild stretch of rapids farther along. Once an entire boatload of cork people capsized right before the stretch of slow, gentle water where, typically, the children retrieved them.
One time, as they stood on the shore watching for their boats to come dancing down the brook, they had spotted a cork person from the year before—bobbing along, hatless, boatless, naked, but somehow still afloat.
Toby, four years old at the time, had leaned into the shallows (holding Eleanor’s hand, though reluctantly) to retrieve the remains of a bedraggled cork person, and studied its face.
“It’s Bob,” he said. Named for one of Cam’s teammates on his softball team, the Yellow Jackets.
Ursula pronounced this a miracle, though to Toby there seemed nothing particularly surprising about the unexpected return of an old familiar character.
Cork people went away. Cork people came back. Or didn’t.
“People die sometimes,” Toby pointed out to Ursula (older than him by a year and a half, but less inclined to confront the darker side). Not only people whose songs you listened to on the radio and people you heard about on the news, and a princess whose wedding you watched on TV, and a whole space shuttle filled with astronauts, and a mop-topped rock and roll singer whose songs you danced to in the kitchen, but people you knew, too. A neighbor from down the road who showed you a gypsy moth cocoon, and a guy who came to your parents’ Labor Day party and did an imitation of a rooster, and a best friend who took you to a water park one time. And dogs would die, and grandparents, a child to whom you once offered your last mozzarella stick at your father’s softball game, even. And even when those things didn’t happen, other terrible things did. You had to get used to it.
But here was one story you could count on, one that never changed. Spring, summer, fall, winter, the water flowed on. These rocks would be here forever—rocks, among the things in the world Toby loved best, and as much as Toby had considered the losses around him, the thought that he and the people he loved best would ever cease to exist was beyond his imagining.
In Toby’s mind, their family would always stay together, always loving each other, and what else really mattered more than that? This was the world as they knew it. This was how it seemed to them then, and maybe even Eleanor believed as much, once.
Part 1
1.
A Familiar Road
The sound reached them all the way down to the field where the chairs were set up—so loud that if Eleanor hadn’t been holding Louise as tightly as she had, she might have dropped her. A few people screamed, and someone yelled, “Oh, shit!” Eleanor could hear the voice of one of the assembled guests begin to pray, in Spanish. Louise, observing the scene, burst into tears and called for her mother.
The noise was like nothing she’d ever heard. A crash, followed by a low, awful groaning. Then silence.
“Oh, God,” someone cried out. “Dios mío.” Someone else.
“We’ll find your mama,” Eleanor told Louise, scanning the assembled guests for her daughter, Louise’s mother, Ursula. Eleanor herself took in the event—whatever it was—with a certain unexpected calm. Worse things had happened than whatever was going on now, she knew that much. And though the piece of land on which she now stood had once represented, for her, the spot where she’d live forever and the one where she would die, this place was no longer her home, and hadn’t been for fifteen years.
It was impossible to know, at first, where the sound came from, or what had caused it. Earthquake? Plane crash? Terrorist attack? Her mind went—crazily—to a movie she’d seen about a tsunami, a woman whose entire family had been wiped out by one vast, awful wave.
But Eleanor’s family was safe. Now she could see them all around her—dazed, confused, but unhurt. All she really needed to do at a moment like this was to make sure that Louise was all right. Her precious only granddaughter, three years old.
At the moment they heard the crash, Louise had been studying Eleanor’s necklace, a very small golden bird on a
chain. “You’re okay,” Eleanor whispered into her ear, when they heard the big boom. All around them, the guests in wedding attire were running with no particular sense of a destination, calling out words nobody could hear.
“Everybody’s fine,” Eleanor said. “Let’s go see your mother.”
Cam’s farm—she was accustomed now to calling it that—lay a little over an hour’s drive north of her condo in Brookline. She had made the trip to bear witness to the marriage of her firstborn child, Ursula’s older sibling, at the home where she once lived.
After all these years, she still knew this place so well that she could have made her way down the long driveway in the dark without benefit of headlights. She knew every knot in the floorboards of the house, the windowsill where Toby used to line up his favorite specimens from his rock collection, the places glitter got stuck deep in the cracks from their valentine-making projects, the uneven counter where she rolled out cookie dough and packed lunches for school, or (on snow days) fixed popcorn and cocoa for the three of them when they came in from sledding. She knew what the walls looked like inside the closet where she’d retreat, holding the phone she’d outfitted with an extra-long cord, in a time long before cell phones, when she’d needed to conduct a business conversation without the sounds of her children’s voices distracting her.
And more: The bathroom where her son once played his miniature violin. The pantry, shelves lined with the jam and spaghetti sauce she canned every summer. The record player spinning while the five of them danced to the Beatles, or Chuck Berry, or Free to Be . . . You and Me. The mantel where they’d hung their stockings and the patch of rug, in front of the fireplace, where she spread ashes to suggest the footprints of a visitor who’d come down the chimney in the night.
Eleanor knew where the wild blueberries grew, and the lady’s slippers, and where the rock was, down the road, where they’d launched their cork people every March when the snow thawed and the brook ran fast under the stone bridge. The pear tree she and Cam had planted, after the birth of their first child. The place in the field where cornflowers came up in late June. Just now starting to bloom. A shade of blue like no other.
And here she was, attending the wedding of that same child. In another lifetime, they’d named that baby Alison. They called him Al now.
Count the Ways Page 1
