Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  He told her she didn’t need a bike of her own. She could have a seat on the back of his. He’d take her to California.

  “Big talk,” Darla said. “Bobby’s whole family comes from Akersville. Grandparents, stepdad, half sisters, you name it. The guy’s never been farther than Salisbury Beach. He just said those things to get in my pants.”

  The biggest mistake of her life was selling the Suzuki, she said. They used the money for a down payment on their trailer. Three months later, what do you know, there’s a baby on the way.

  Robert Junior was born with a hole in his heart. (“Took after his father,” Darla said. “Bad joke.”) He lived seven months.

  “I could’ve still got out at that point. Nothing keeping me besides the damn mobile home. But you know what happened? After I lost Robert Junior, all I wanted was another baby. That was Kimmie.”

  She was four years old now. “Light of my life, I’m telling you,” Darla said. “One thing’s for sure, no way she’s ending up in a double-wide with a guy that stays up all night watching TV.”

  They didn’t even ride together anymore, Darla told Eleanor. She could, but there was Kimmie to consider. “If it was just me out on the road, going ninety up Route 89, I’d take my chances. But I’m not going to leave my kid without a mom, you know?

  “You’ve got the right idea,” she said to Eleanor, looking out the porch screen at the field below the house, where Eleanor and Walt had planted her vegetable garden. “No man telling you what to do. Nothing holding you down except the dog, and all he’s going to do is lick your hand and wag his tail. Right, Charlie?”

  He thumped his tail on the floor.

  After that it got to be a regular thing. The two of them would sit in Eleanor’s kitchen while Kimmie played with the Monopoly pieces or colored with Eleanor’s pencils and Darla told Eleanor stories from her life or offered her observations of the world beyond Akersville that she’d never gotten to explore.

  “Can you believe that Patty Hearst?” Darla said. She might be the daughter of a millionaire, growing up in San Francisco and all (San Francisco! The place Darla was heading when she met Bobby), but in a funny way, Darla identified with her.

  “She had it all,” Darla said. “Then she meets this guy and he takes her away and they start robbing banks. Next thing you know, she’s calling herself Tania and she’s on the front page wearing some damned camo gear, holding an M16.”

  According to Darla, this was what love did to a person. You got brainwashed.

  She stayed home with her daughter now. She would’ve liked to work, but Bobby wouldn’t let her. He had lots of opinions about how she was supposed to be.

  “It could be worse,” she said. “He could be on drugs. He knocks me around sometimes but nothing serious.”

  She cleaned houses for summer people. Bobby didn’t know anything about the housecleaning jobs. He wouldn’t like it if he did. The only house Darla was supposed to clean was their own. His house, actually. That’s how he put it.

  When she had enough set aside, she was going to use it for a down payment on an apartment for her and Kimmie. Not in this town. Someplace far away. Manchester, maybe, or even Boston.

  “I always wanted to go to college,” she said. She knew this probably sounded weird, but she wanted to get certified to be an undertaker.

  “Some people might find that kind of work creepy,” she told Eleanor, “but dead people don’t bother me. Plus, you deal with the families. You work with people at the saddest time in their life. If you do a good job, you can make a difference.”

  “If I told any of this to Bobby, he’d belt me,” she told Eleanor. “But it’s OK. I’m getting out soon.”

  Darla did most of the talking, those afternoons on the porch. She had a lot to say, and Eleanor was probably the only one she could say it to. But one afternoon, Eleanor told her what had happened with Matt Hallinan.

  “Let’s make an oath,” Darla said. “One of these days, you’re going to stick it to that guy. Same as one of these days I’m leaving Bobby in my dust. We just have to wait for our moment.”

  One time when they were out on the porch, a little later than usual, Bobby came by looking for Darla. Charlie hardly ever barked, but when he heard Bobby’s Harley coming down the long driveway, he did, and when Bobby stood in the doorway, he hid under the table.

  “I had a feeling I’d find my wife here,” he said to Eleanor. Then he turned in Darla’s direction. “I know how you love chitchatting with your girlfriend,” he said, “but it’s time to go.”

  Darla’s voice sounded different when she spoke to him. “You go on ahead, hon,” she said. “I’ll be home soon.”

  He turned toward Eleanor again. “Your friend here has her responsibilities.”

  “I’ll just pack up Kimmie’s pictures,” she told him.

  “I said now.” He picked up a drawing his daughter had made. A stick figure meant to be a portrait of Charlie.

  “I wasn’t finished with my picture,” Kimmie said.

  “This woman here,” Bobby said, placing his hand on Darla’s neck, tight enough that Eleanor could see her flinch. “She’s something in the sack.”

  “Stop it, Bobby,” Darla said.

  “You ashamed of what I do to you, baby?” he told her. “How I drive you crazy? You tell your friend how you’re always begging for more?”

  “I’m sorry,” Darla said. “This is what happens when he drinks.”

  “This is what happens when a man comes home and his wife isn’t there to make him dinner,” he said.

  He roared off on his bike. Darla, in her car, with Kimmie in the back, followed behind.

  It was late November, heading into Eleanor’s third winter alone in the house. The ash tree out front had been bare for weeks, and now she’d turned back the clocks, which left her needing to turn on the lights by three thirty and stoke the woodstove all through the day. There had been a telephone conference with her editor about Bodie Goes to Space, and by the time she hung up the phone she realized the room was dark and it was nearly dinnertime.

  It was the third week of deer season, that time when hunters who hadn’t bagged one yet started feeling desperate. Driving into town the day before to pick up groceries, Eleanor had passed two houses in front of whose garages hung the upside-down carcasses of recent kill. Men in orange vests were everywhere. All day, shots had rung out from the woods.

  As she usually did, she ended her workday with a walk to the waterfall, wearing an orange hat on account of the hunters. Normally, Charlie would have accompanied her, but when he didn’t come, after she called him, she figured he was probably off chasing squirrels.

  Rounding the last bend in the road, where the old ash tree came into view, she expected to see Charlie stretched out on the step, but he wasn’t there, and she realized then that it had been hours since she’d seen her dog. She walked to the edge of the woods and called to him in the growing darkness. Nothing.

  She was back in the kitchen, vaguely uneasy without having anything to do about it, when she heard the sound of tires. Living at the end of a dead-end road as she did, hearing the sound of a car was a rare event. Just about the only visitors Eleanor got out here were the Federal Express man or Darla or Walt, come to check up on her. (Most recently, there had been a sudden infestation of bats in the big upstairs open space. Walt had spent the afternoon getting rid of them for her, refusing payment. One more thing for Edith to be annoyed about.)

  But it wasn’t Walt’s truck she saw coming down the road. It was a police car. There appeared to be something on top of the vehicle. As the car got closer she could make out the body of an animal, but not a deer. She stepped into the driveway to get a better look.

  It was Charlie, held to the roof with a couple of bungee cords, a single stream of blood running down the windshield. His tail, which never failed to wag when she came within range, hung down the side of the car, unmoving.

  Eleanor ran to the police car, her hand to her mouth. Sh
e might have screamed but no sound came out of her. The officer stepped out of his vehicle.

  “This your animal? I spotted him up the road a ways, chasing a deer. Sorry about your pup here, but we’ve got procedures to follow when an animal does that.”

  From inside his patrol car Eleanor could hear the voice of the dispatcher, crackling. From the house, the voice of Joni Mitchell. I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

  “You got two options,” he told her. “I can leave the body here for you to take care of, or we can dispose of it back at the station. Animal control.”

  She stared at the spot on Charlie’s body where the bullet had entered his chest. When the officer lifted him up slightly, she took in how much blood there was. She would bury her dog under the ash tree with a pile of stones to mark the spot. Walt would give her a hand.

  The death of Charlie changed everything. Until then, even in her loneliest times, Eleanor had viewed her life on the farm as a romantic adventure. Though she had no idea of what might happen to change things—or where the children were going to come from, whose bedroom awaited them—she believed, a little like her character, Bodie, that sooner or later, amazing things would happen to her. She would fix the house up to be something like the illustrations in her book of Carl Larsson drawings. She’d have this great garden, exploding with flowers. She’d create these magical stories, one of which would feature herself as the heroine. One day, in the not-so-distant future, her rescuer would appear, and their life together, her real life, would begin.

  In the weeks and months after the police car came down the long driveway with her dog lashed to the roof, a new and terrible thought came to her. Maybe how things were now was not simply a temporary state she’d pass through on the way to her real life. Maybe this was her real life—sitting by the fire listening to sad songs with a bowl of popcorn for dinner, drawing pictures of a made-up child. Darla and Kimmie came by now and then, and Walt, but days went by sometimes in which she spoke to nobody. Before, she could have counted on the sound of Charlie breathing at her feet. Now, except for times she played music, the one sound she heard was that of her own pencils on the paper. The house was that quiet.

  11.

  A Red-Headed Man

  Normally, Eleanor worked all day, writing and illustrating her Bodie stories. Seven days a week she put in her hours, not winding down until around four thirty, when she’d take her walk to the waterfall and, in warm weather, swim.

  But she’d seen a poster for a craft fair that weekend, a few towns north, and decided to give herself a break.

  It was a gorgeous day. Late April, the leaves on the ash tree out front just starting to unfurl themselves, the first crocus breaking through the soil where a few last patches of snow had not yet melted. In the car on the way to the fair, she put on a Doc Watson tape. “If I Needed You” started playing—a Townes Van Zandt song she loved. She sang along with the tape. I’d swim the seas for to ease your pain.

  The fair was housed in the parking lot outside the Masonic lodge of the town, though most of the craftspeople displaying their work were hippies rather than Masons. If a person wanted a very solid ceramic casserole or a mandala, or a mug that probably wouldn’t break if you threw it on a concrete floor, this was the place to find it. Also macramé plant hangers and hand-stenciled wrapping paper and hooked rugs and homemade soap and braided rugs and patchwork quilts. Breadboards in the shape of the state of New Hampshire.

  She had spotted him the minute she walked into the hall. Hard to miss a six-foot-three-inch red-headed man, curls circling his face like a halo, with a goat tied to his display table. A simple hand-lettered banner was stretched across the front: “Cameron. Maker of Beautiful Things.” A small cluster of people had gathered—ostensibly to sample the cheese he’d set out, though Eleanor guessed they had been drawn to the red-headed man’s table for the same reason she was. The man.

  He was talking about the products he made, apparently, and a group had assembled to listen to him. Women, not surprisingly. He may have been the most handsome person Eleanor had ever laid eyes on, but there was more to it than that. Anyone could see this person had an air of assurance about him, with his checkered shirt and his red bandanna and his one pierced ear and his leather boots that looked as if they’d been made by some wonderful old Italian shoemaker, though it was also possible he’d made them himself. He was the kind of person other people probably tried to imitate, but they weren’t likely to succeed. Wherever it was he was going, you’d want to come.

  In addition to cheese, the red-headed man made hand-turned bowls from tree burls. Some of these were so small all they could hold was a handful of nuts, though there was one burl bowl on display so large it could have held salad for twenty people.

  Eleanor visited all the other craft tables before making her way to the red-headed man’s display.

  She cupped the smallest bowl in her hands, stroking the wood. The goat was chewing on her skirt, but Eleanor kept her gaze on the inside of the bowl. If she looked directly into his eyes, she knew it would be all over.

  He spoke his name to her. “I thought you’d never stop at my table,” he said.

  He extended his hand. Not as rough as you’d think, for a man who worked in wood. Later she would learn that he rubbed oil on his palms and fingertips every night, to soften them.

  “You know what I really want to do with this bowl,” she said. “I want to put it up to my face so I can feel it against my cheek.” After she said this, she wondered what came over her. She didn’t usually talk this way, particularly to a person she’d just met. Particularly a man.

  “What’s stopping you?” he said. “I have a policy that if I feel like doing something, unless it’s going to hurt someone, I do it.”

  Years later Eleanor could still remember how he looked that first night, when he brought her back to the little cabin he’d built, a few miles outside of Brattleboro.

  They brought the goat out to the shed first. He’d made a sign on her pen, out of a burl, with her name carved into it. Opal. “I wanted to name her Alison,” he said. “But I decided to save that one for when I have a daughter.”

  Even that first night he spoke of children. She told him about the death of her dog, which seemed at the time to loom larger than the death of her parents.

  “Charlie was like my best friend,” she told Cam. “Not like my best friend. He was.”

  Back in the house—the air chilly now, though it was April—Cam lit the stove. He took off his shirt in the firelight—his skin freckled and glistening, his face so finely chiseled it was as if she could see the skull beneath his skin. His body was as keenly defined as a figure in the old anatomy book she kept on her desk back home—every rib visible.

  “I’d like to draw you,” she said. She surprised her own self with her boldness. She was not a person who could talk about sex, or his body, or her own. But from the moment they’d met she had felt strangely at ease, safe even, in his presence. “I never go anyplace without my drawing pencils.”

  “Draw me? Nobody ever did that before,” he said. “Cool.”

  He stepped out of the rest of his clothes with as little self-consciousness as if he were peeling a piece of fruit, and for the next hour she sat there making a portrait of him on the back of a piece of newsprint laid flat on his kitchen table.

  He knew how to keep perfectly still. He didn’t try to talk, and neither did Eleanor. She was perfectly concentrated on the act of studying his body and re-creating it on the page. His gaze remained fixed on her.

  It was two hours later when she set down the pencil. Still naked, he walked over to the table and studied the image she’d made of him on the page.

  “You got me,” he told her. “Not a lot of people do.”

  Up until this, Eleanor had felt a surprising absence of self-consciousness, probably on account of focusing as she did on her drawing, but now she felt the warmth in her face and, more so, deep in her body.

  “I don’t kno
w about you, but I’m starving,” he said.

  He pulled on his pants and cooked for her on the tiny gas stove in his one-room cabin overlooking the river—table, chair, apple crate with a few pairs of long underwear and jeans, a couple of T-shirts folded on top, a futon. The dish he made featured olives and sun-dried tomatoes, eggs, goat cheese courtesy of Opal, some herb Eleanor should have recognized but didn’t, cumin maybe. Before he set the meal on the floor—the floor, not the table, because he had only one chair—he had laid out an Indian bedspread and a couple of pillows. He lit candles—not one, but five or six—and put on a recording of some Celtic singer. Partway through the meal, he had leaned in and studied her face. “You have sauce on your chin,” he said, and licked it off.

  This was the moment he kissed her, long and slow, with his hands circling the back of her neck, almost as if he were some weary traveler, finally arrived at a watering hole. They stayed that way, pressed up against each other, neither one of them moving, for a surprisingly long time.

  “I know this might sound crazy, but I want to make babies with you. I have this feeling you’d make a wonderful mother” he said. “I want to make a family.”

  “I’ve only had sex with one person, ever,” she told him. She did not add that it happened in the front seat of the car of her roommate’s older brother, with her eyes shut and her fingers gripping the seat, waiting for it to be over.

  “That other person you were with, before,” he said, “I’m guessing he hurt you. But I won’t.”

  That first night, they slept together. It was nothing like what had happened with Matt that summer in Rhode Island. She didn’t want to close her eyes. She wanted to see his face. When they finally fell asleep, Cam’s arms stayed wrapped around her. When she woke up, he was still holding her.

  He moved into her house ten days later with two apple crates containing his tools, Opal the goat, a sack of goat feed, the harmonica he intended to learn how to play, and his dog, Sally, who sniffed Charlie’s old dog bed briefly, then settled in. Two months after that Eleanor was pregnant.