Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  She probably fell in love with Cam the moment she met him—with his shirt open and a black-eyed Susan tucked behind his ear, reaching out his hand in her direction. A cleft in his chin. Perfect teeth. That smile. “Cameron, actually,” he told her. “But nobody calls me that except my mother.”

  Eleanor had never known a person with redder hair. Not strawberry blond, but true red, curling down to his shoulders—like a man with his head on fire, she used to say. She could still remember the feeling of her hands raking through that hair, and of how, when he lowered his body over hers, those curls fell over her face. She had loved his body, loved his seemingly endless capacity for any new experience, mystery, joy. She could not get over the fact that a person like him would have noticed her and sought her out. There had been nothing remotely self-assured about Eleanor, but maybe that was what had drawn him to her.

  He spoke of babies the night they met.

  He moved in with her—here, on this farm—the week after they met. They were married that summer. Watched their first child born on their bed the winter that followed, and within less than four years, two more.

  How does it happen that a person with whom you have shared your most intimate moments—greatest love, greatest pain, joy, also grief—can become a stranger?

  3.

  Some Tree

  Earlier that afternoon, shortly after her uneasy arrival at the farm, but before she’d located Al or Ursula—or known whether Ursula would even be speaking to her, or if she’d have a chance to meet Louise—Eleanor had spotted a very old woman sitting off to herself under the tent. It took her a moment to realize that this was her former neighbor Edith, from down the road. She did not approach her.

  Edith had never liked Eleanor, probably because her husband, Walt, had liked her too much.

  Walt had died years ago. All those years living down the road from Eleanor—before her marriage to Cam and after—Walt had been as good a friend to her as anyone. Especially in the days when she’d lived here on her own, Walt used to stop by just to check up on Eleanor and see if she needed his assistance with anything. He’d delivered cordwood for the stove and split it for her, and he helped her get rid of a family of skunks who’d moved into the shed. After she got together with Cam, he’d been less quick to come over, but he still left zucchini and tomatoes from his garden on their doorstep.

  “You know the old man’s got a thing for you, right?” Cam had told Eleanor, after one of Walt’s visits.

  “He’s just my friend,” Eleanor said. “He likes to look after me.” Not a whole lot of other people had.

  It had been Walt into whose arms she had collapsed that day Cam told her he didn’t want to be married to her anymore, that he’d fallen in love with someone else.

  “Your husband’s a fool,” Walt said, stroking her hair, the one and only time he’d done so. They had stood there like that for no more than thirty seconds, probably—the longest he’d ever dared embrace her, the only time. Then he’d climbed back onto his tractor.

  It had been Walt who carried her boxes of possessions out to the U-Haul the day she moved out. Walt who drove the truck.

  “I still don’t get it,” he said. “Why it’s you that has to go.”

  Eleanor didn’t explain this to Walt, but she knew the answer. Sometimes you leave a place because you don’t like being there. Sometimes you have to leave because you love it too much.

  The brothers were rounding everyone up now, with instructions to gather in the lower field behind the house, the spot where a guitarist was playing and someone had constructed an arbor. The ceremony was due to begin, and they were anxious to get on with it, in part no doubt because everyone had been studying the sky, whose darkening clouds suggested a coming thunderstorm.

  As the best man in the day’s ceremony, Eleanor’s son Toby—the youngest of their three—stood next to the groom, with that familiar shock of unfathomably red hair, that wistful look, like a visitor from some other planet, still trying after all these years to figure out how life was conducted on this one. Unsure how long he’d be sticking around.

  This was Toby—twenty-eight years old now, but with the face of his five-year-old self barely changed, his expression perpetually dreamy. Toby, the sweetest boy alive—hard to think of him as a man, who trusted everyone and bore no grudges and wept at the death of a baby lamb or a bird who crashed into the window. On a day when her daughter had met her with wary formality and her older son, distraction, Eleanor felt gratitude that the face of her youngest child had lit up when he spotted her. He still called her Mama.

  Just the act of taking the ring from his pocket to hand to his older brother had seemed to take place in slow motion. His brother, a concept to which Toby had adapted more swiftly and with greater ease than any of the rest of them. What did it matter if this person called himself a man or a woman? He was someone Toby had loved all his life. It was that simple.

  Sitting there with Louise still fingering her bird necklace, Eleanor studied the groom—the son who used to be her daughter, staring at his bride—his gaze full of love, his face familiar and unknown, both at once. Here they all were, on the same piece of land where they’d started out, the same cast of characters, more or less, all these years later, though with the happy and unexpected addition of Teresa’s large Mexican American family come to celebrate, along with Elijah. And Louise.

  “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” The familiar, old-fashioned words, spoken in Spanish by a Jesuit priest, a cousin of Teresa’s, assisted by a friend of the couple from Seattle, ordained for the day by the Universal Life Church, who added, “You may now kiss the bride.”

  Al and Teresa finally released each other from their long embrace and turned to face the assembled guests. A trio of mariachi musicians who’d flown in from Texas began to play. Now everyone was milling around—taking pictures, admiring the floral arrangements, checking themselves for ticks. Having worried all afternoon about the possibility of a thunderstorm, a sigh of relief seemed to overtake them all as the final words of the service were spoken. The sky was overcast, nothing more. Disaster averted.

  Eleanor had gotten up from her seat, Louise in her arms, and headed for a spot a little ways over on the hill. “Grammy!” Louise pointed to a plastic bottle she’d left on the ground by the chair. “My bubbles.” Feeling like an outsider, Eleanor felt glad to have a job to do, retrieving it.

  That was when they heard it. The crash.

  First had come the lightning, a crack like the sky splitting in two. A person might have mistaken it for gunfire. One shot, followed within a fraction of a second by a volley of others, like nothing she’d ever heard.

  Then came a different, deeper sound, louder than the first, and not from the sky this time, as a flash of light shot down, like a message from God in some old painting. From where they’d gathered for the service, at the foot of the hill, nobody had seen it yet, but this was the moment Old Ashworthy came crashing to the ground.

  Ursula’s old lab, Matador, reached the spot first. He was barking loudly. The rest of the group made it up the hill a few moments later.

  Huddled together in the pounding rain, they could see it all plainly then: the giant tree lay lengthwise, from the grape arbor all the way to the pond, its branches splayed in all directions, as if the whole world had just gone sideways. Three centuries’ worth of growth—spring, summer, fall, winter, a few hundred years of the cycle repeating itself, the tree growing taller and thicker, branches reaching out in a leafy green canopy for as long as any of them remembered and long before.

  Lightning had split its trunk down the middle. Limbs and splinters lay spilled in all directions like a bunch of pickup sticks, leaving leaves and branches scattered across the grass over the perennial bed and down onto the field.

  Long ago—the year their marriage was falling apart, though Eleanor had been too occupied with everything else to recognize it—Ali had built a fort in this tree, a getaway from what was going on in the house at
the time, probably. Now Eleanor could make out, through the tangle of fallen branches, the remnants of the rungs Ali had hammered into the trunk. If she and Cam hadn’t been so distracted that year—Eleanor consumed by anger and grief, Cam drunk on new love for a girl who could still view him as a hero, not a disappointment—they would have inspected that ladder and recognized how unsafe it was, how easily those rungs might have given way.

  And now look. It was not the sketchy ladder that presented the greatest risk, or the long fall. The rungs had held fast. It had not been the wooden slats that gave way but the tree itself.

  There stood Eleanor’s children—adults now, all three of them older than she and Cam had been at the moments of their births—standing in a semicircle around the wreckage, their hands to their faces. Only Toby spoke—Toby, for whom life appeared less complicated than it did for the rest of them. Toby, whose vocabulary contained so many fewer words, yet those he spoke sometimes identified the truth with greatest clarity.

  “Some tree,” he said, shaking his head.

  4.

  Fixer-Upper

  In the spring of the year Eleanor turned twenty, she bought a secondhand Toyota Corolla and set out on the road to buy a house. It was late May the first time she laid eyes on the farm.

  She’d driven a couple of hundred miles that day—that day, and a dozen before it. There was something comforting about all that driving. Put a person in a car with a full tank of gas, give her a road map, and never mind if she can’t think of one hopeful thing to look forward to. She can listen to the radio and keep driving.

  The Watergate hearings were in full swing, though Eleanor had only the vaguest idea of what any of that was about. A year had gone by since the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. The first issue of Ms. Magazine. Title IX. All around her, women were making it clear, for good reason no doubt, that they no longer wanted to be defined by life in the home. But for Eleanor, it was home that mattered more than any of the rest. She’d gone looking for hers.

  Eleanor put a thousand miles on the Toyota in those days she spent on the road, driving around Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire. She didn’t listen to the news much. She kept a mixtape playing, of songs she loved, most of them sad. George Jones fit the bill, as did old Irish ballads about love gone wrong, and, equally, certain old R&B singers, but only the ballads. Otis Redding singing “These Arms of Mine” got to her every time, as did Edith Piaf. The heartfelt lyrics of James Taylor songs never really spoke to her, but Joni Mitchell’s did—her yearning for love, her endless disappointments, and the realization she seemed to have acquired, young as she was, that for all her handsome rock star boyfriends, she might be alone forever. Alone on a two-lane highway, Eleanor sang along with Dolly Parton. In my Tennessee mountain home / Life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh. And with Joni. She played Blue on repeat all the way from upstate New York to the New Hampshire border.

  There had been nothing particularly distinctive about Akersville when she stopped there. No cute coffee shops. No traffic light even. Most cars that passed this way drove on through.

  It had been a random choice on Eleanor’s part, pulling into this town. For close to two weeks she’d been staying at a different motel every night, living on handfuls of raw almonds and bags of carrots and Dannon boysenberry yogurt, picking up real estate flyers at rest stops with one idea in her head: to find a safe landing place.

  Eleanor had pulled up in front of Abercrombie’s Realty, with its row of straggly pansies and the faded wooden sign “Where Dreams Come Home.” The agent on duty was a man in his late sixties, from the looks of it, nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Ed Abercrombie,” he told her, extending a hand.

  Not many people Eleanor’s age went real estate shopping. Even if they had the means, they wouldn’t have possessed the inclination. But if Ed Abercrombie felt surprise or curiosity about any of this, he concealed it well.

  More often than not, when Eleanor had stopped at some Realtor’s office on her odd, solitary road trip, they didn’t take her seriously. Maybe they detected a certain sense of melancholy desperation tucked under the surface of her greeting as she entered their offices—her tight smile, her unnaturally vigorous handshake. She probably appeared too eager (she usually did), her needs too urgent. A person might sense, meeting Eleanor that spring, that her desire to buy a piece of property suggested a hunger deeper than that of the ordinary client.

  Ed’s only question concerned her employment. Not a whole lot of jobs in this area, he told her. That might be a problem.

  Only it wasn’t.

  “I make books for children,” she said. (Did he notice her fingernails, bitten down below the quick? The very slight trembling of her hand as she brushed her hair out of her eyes?)

  “You make a living doing that?” he said. “Don’t like to pry, but the bank’s going to ask you. Taxes aren’t cheap around here.”

  “It won’t be a problem,” she told him. To the surprise of no one more than Eleanor herself, her first book, published the previous year, had sold almost a hundred thousand copies. She’d be getting to work on the fourth one soon.

  “I write about a little girl without any parents who travels around the world having adventures.”

  “A writer,” he said. “What do you know? My wife used to write poetry.”

  Actually, Eleanor explained to him, she was more of an artist. She made pictures with stories attached. She could have gone on to explain to Ed that since she was five years old—younger maybe, an only child left to her own devices for long stretches—she’d seldom found herself without a pencil in her hand. She’d spent her childhood making up characters to keep her company and stories about the things that happened in their lives, things that never in a million years would have happened in Eleanor’s. Some of these stories featured a girl named Bodie whose parents had died in a car wreck, who headed out to explore the world in search of a mysterious great-aunt she’d always heard about but never met, who was an archaeologist. Eleanor’s English teacher at boarding school had suggested she send one of her Bodie stories to a publisher, along with the illustrations she’d made.

  She had not yet graduated when the editors at Applewood Press had invited her to their offices to meet them. One week later, not yet in possession of a car, she had ridden the bus to New York City to meet with them. Now, in addition to Bodie Under the Sea, there was Bodie Goes to the Potato Chip Factory and, soon, Bodie in Zanzibar. Just before setting out on her epic journey in search of real estate, Eleanor had signed a contract to deliver Bodie, Queen of the Desert. She hadn’t collected the check yet, but when it came, it would be a large one.

  She had tried for a while there to do the things other young people did. Go to college. Fall in love. More than publishing children’s books, what Eleanor had hungered for was a normal life, or something resembling that.

  Only Eleanor never did well at normal life. She had lasted at college exactly one month shy of finishing her sophomore year. That was when she moved out of her dorm, packed up her mixtapes and albums, bought the Toyota, set out on the road.

  She had thirty-seven thousand dollars in her checking account—the advance from her publisher for Bodie in Zanzibar, along with royalties from her first two Bodie books. Plenty of money, no place to live. This was when she decided to buy a house. Maybe, if she had a house, all the other parts that came with that—the things that happened in people’s houses, in people’s lives, so absent in her own—might also be within reach.

  There was nobody to tell her this wasn’t a good idea. This was the problem, in fact. Apart from her editor, who just reminded her when her next manuscript was due, and her agent, who read over the contracts, there was nobody to tell Eleanor anything.

  Now here she was in Akersville, New Hampshire, listening to Ed Abercrombie talking about a log home he’d just listed, with vinyl siding and a mother-in-law unit out back.

  Eleanor didn’t know much, but one part was clear: the place Eleanor was looking for didn’
t have to be very large, but it would have land around it, and be far enough from town that you could see the stars. She needed good light, she told Ed, for making artwork. She’d never had a garden before, but she wanted to grow tomatoes and maybe peas, lettuce for salad. Zinnias.

  Close to water would be nice, Eleanor told Ed. If not on the property itself, nearby.

  Well, there was this one place, he said. Right down the road from a swimming hole and a waterfall. The owners hadn’t actually put it on the market yet, but he could show her.

  “This one’s a real fixer-upper,” he told her.

  The old Murchison homestead had been unoccupied for five years at this point—and even before that, the family only came up summers. Nobody had spent a winter in the house since before the war, and Ed wasn’t talking about Vietnam or even Korea. There was an ancient furnace but no insulation. The town no longer plowed the road, though if Eleanor lived there in the winter—he studied her face here, assessing the likelihood of this—she’d have a right to request it. Ten minutes later, she was in the passenger seat of Ed’s Oldsmobile headed north out of town.

  On their way, Ed handed her the sheet with the listing information, but Eleanor chose to look out the window instead. Though she took in a number of fine old colonials and capes—the kind with stone walls around them and apple trees out back—this wasn’t one of those prettied-up New England towns featured on postcards and calendars. There were two-hundred-year-old houses like the one Ed was taking her to, but there were also double-wide trailers and ranch houses with cars in the yard that didn’t appear drivable. A pizza place, a Laundromat, a gas station, a church next to which were cemeteries with gravestones that went back to the seventeen hundreds, Ed told her.