Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  In Eleanor’s eyes, Cam would always be the man who had left their son to wander alone into the pond that day. To Coco, Cam was still the handsome artist-hero she had loved since she was cartwheeling around the edges of the softball field, a man who could make bowls out of burls and forts out of refrigerator boxes and ice castles out of snow—a man who could make the most amazing catches on the softball field and kick a soccer ball farther than anybody. Who wouldn’t choose to be with a young girl who could see you as a hero, over the one who had witnessed the moment of your greatest failure and never let you forget it?

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m in love with Coco. I know how you see me, but I’m not that guy. I just don’t want to be married to you anymore.”

  51.

  A Marriage Not Long Enough to Bear Peaches

  After, when she could bring herself to think about those years (as, for a long time, she could not), Eleanor named the days when her children were little—she and Cam consumed by their care and raising, no doubt to the detriment of their marriage—as the happiest she had known. Later she would look back and realize how brief that stretch of time had been, that constituted the sum total of her marriage to her children’s father, before everything fell away. It had been a handful of seasons, when you got down to counting—not even enough of them that they’d buried a dog together or seen their peach tree bear fruit. Thunderstorms on the porch, picnics in the field, science fair projects and art projects and trips to the ocean, snow days and sick days and summer evenings at softball games, winter mornings of pancakes with Reddi-wip squirted on top (Cam’s idea, of course), shoveling out the car, trips to the dump, uneasy visits from the grandparents, times their checking account went overdrawn and other times—fewer of these—when some unexpected royalty check had shown up, and the two of them went out for dinner and looked into each other’s eyes.

  Did they hold hands across the table then? When they got home and paid the babysitter—the babysitter, there was a story—did they make love? Did they still love each other, or were they just too distracted by everything else to even ask the question, too consumed with everything else to even consider the question, were they happy?

  Later, she would wonder if maybe it was never that good in the first place. Maybe all that time, she’d been kidding herself. When you looked closer, maybe trouble was always there, lurking under the sweet pictures of their lives together. Maybe trouble was always everywhere, and what mattered was what you did about it. Some people hung on and kept bobbing down the stream. Some went overboard.

  Later, when Alison began turning away from her—Alison and then Ursula, never Toby, thank God—Eleanor wondered if any of it had been real, after all. Maybe she’d been a bad mother, without even knowing it. Maybe nothing she’d once believed was true.

  Scenes came back to her in the night. Not of the good times, but of others.

  She’d found an old piece of hamburger meat in the back of the refrigerator one time, left so long that when she took it out it turned out to be teeming with maggots. This was the picture that came to her now.

  Milk gone sour. The blood in Matt Hallinan’s car. The sound of the abortion doctor’s voice, coming from the machine in his neck. Mr. Guttenberg, standing in her dorm room. There’s been an accident.

  She was back in Crazyland now. The room was spinning. Everything wrong that ever happened, that she had chosen not to consider, swirled around her like whiteout conditions in a blizzard, so bad you can’t see the road five feet in front of you anymore, and the only thing for it is to pull over, only maybe you can’t.

  She was gunning the engine. The hunt for the Barbie shoe, the bûche de Noël, but ten times worse.

  She thought about the time her station wagon had broken down on a muddy road with four children in the back (hers, and Toby’s friend Jack) and she had knocked on someone’s door in town to call Cam, only he didn’t pick up, and when she’d finally made it home with them all, on foot, it turned out he was playing the Talking Heads so loud he hadn’t heard.

  “You have to hear this song,” he said, as she walked in the door. He didn’t even say anything, just started playing “Creatures of Love.”

  She had just looked at him.

  There was the time when she thought she was pregnant again, and they knew they couldn’t afford it, and she had stayed up all night crying. They were still trying to figure out what to do when she had the miscarriage—blood all over the kitchen floor, as she was mopping it. They had sat up together most of that night, holding each other. “I guess we really wanted that baby after all,” he’d said.

  Not that they’d try again.

  The steak on his breath the night Alison was born. The way he’d looked at Timmy Pouliot’s girlfriend at their Labor Day party. A time—such a small moment, but it had stayed with her; had she imagined this?—when, with his arm draped across her body in the dark, a few months after the birth of one of their children (Ursula? Toby?), he had gathered up the loose flesh of her belly and said, “Maybe somebody needs to cut down on the butter.” A look on his face when she stepped out of the tub.

  And then no look at all. He didn’t watch anymore when she pulled her dress over her head or dropped her towel to the floor.

  They had argued about stupid things—who cleaned the vegetable bin in the refrigerator, whose job it was to check Ursula for head lice, and when they found them, whose job it was to spend the next six hours picking out the nits. They’d sworn this wouldn’t happen to them, but days had gone by in which they exchanged little more than the details of who was picking up which child at which friend’s house, or what to bring home from the store. There had been a time when she’d loved it that Cam was an artist, and loved how excited he could be, finding a great piece of wood or creating from it some amazing salad bowl, never mind that nobody was ever going to buy it.

  Then it changed. Then, when he embarked on some new and amazing project—a rock cairn, a bed in the middle of the woods planted with moss, a wind chime made from old spoons—a vague sense of irritation overtook her.

  Why didn’t he get a job?

  She remembered a night, not so far back, that until now she had chosen to forget.

  Eleanor sat at the kitchen table, paying bills. Too many of them, as usual. Once again, she was going to have to figure out which to pay, which to put off for a month.

  Cam was doing pull-ups on the bar he’d attached in the doorway going into the living room. She studied that perfect chest of his, those chiseled abdominal muscles. She set down the calculator.

  “Don’t you ever think about money?” she said.

  It was November—always a hard month, with the days suddenly short and dark, once they’d set back the clocks. The ash tree was bare, its leaves swirling outside the window, and all of winter still ahead of them.

  For a moment there, he had looked confused. They were having a nice evening up until then. He was, anyway.

  “It’s no fun thinking about money,” she said. “But someone around here has to.”

  The grin disappeared. A different expression came over him. He stood in the doorway, bare chested. Like a man waylaid, unarmed, in an alley. No escape possible. For a surprising length of time, he just looked at her.

  “You care so much about money? I’ll give you money,” he said, his voice low and filled with contempt, a voice she’d never heard before. He disappeared from the room for a good ten minutes then, into his woodshop. When he came back, his pockets were stuffed with pieces of paper the size of dollar bills, except that instead of the face of George Washington or Ben Franklin on the front, the face was an ugly green caricature of her own.

  The bills fluttered down over her head and onto the kitchen floor like wedding confetti, but not. Twenty of them at least. More likely fifty.

  “Here’s that money you’re always so goddamned eager for,” he said. “All that beautiful cash you love so much.”

  Even in the middle of this, they both understood not to w
ake the children. He spoke in a voice she didn’t recognize, a terrible whisper. Not a whisper so much as a hiss.

  “You happy, Eleanor? Happy now?”

  Later, he had apologized. Cam was good at that, always ready to make peace, quick to admit when he’d been wrong. Cam was good at letting go of the bad parts. But the memory of that night—his face as he scattered the pretend money over her as she wept—had stayed with Eleanor. Until that night she had not known he was capable of so much coldness or, call it what it was, so much quiet rage. Maybe that’s what happened when someone who had once been in love with you wasn’t anymore.

  Part 2

  52.

  Faulty O-Ring

  February was when Eleanor had always brought out the box of supplies for making valentines—origami paper and wallpaper samples and doilies, glitter and stickers and stick-on rhinestones and stacks of old magazines and seed catalogs to cut up. Every year their creations got more elaborate. The previous Valentine’s Day, Ursula had used a glue gun to attach interesting shells around the edges of a heart-shaped box that had once contained her grandparents’ annual gift of holiday chocolates, with a different note in each of the spaces that used to hold a chocolate—every one of the notes for her mother. Al, never into fanciness, had cut pictures of all different kinds of tomatoes out of the Burpee seed catalog and stuck them on an old cigar box for Cam to use, to store fishing lures and the car keys he was always losing. Toby, before the accident, used to pick out stones from his collection that he’d cover with red poster paint and ice cream sprinkles. One year he had glued hearts all over his naked body and told them the valentine was himself.

  Things were different now. By the first week of February they would have been working every night on their cards, but this year Eleanor had not gotten around to putting out the usual abundance of craft supplies—just a stack of construction paper left over from the previous year and a couple of dried-up markers.

  It was an odd moment to engage in a celebration of love. In the week since she found out about Cam and Coco (if she hadn’t seen them that day, when was he going to tell her?), the five of them (Cam, Eleanor, the children) had carried on with their routines much as before, though a heaviness hung over the household, and even Toby seemed to pick up on it. He was even quieter than usual, and more listless. The formerly pink ribbon remained permanently wrapped around his pointer finger, its frayed tip twirling inside the soft pink opening of his ear.

  Eleanor figured the girls would attribute the mood to what happened to the Challenger. The morning after the explosion Ursula had taken down all the pictures she’d hung in her room. When she took out the trash that afternoon, Eleanor found the commemorative coin Cam’s parents had sent from Florida, with the date January 28, 1986, engraved on the front along with the profiles of the astronauts.

  A week or so after Eleanor had seen Cam and Coco together, he came to her as she was putting away the leftovers from dinner. The children were asleep. The house was quiet.

  Ever since that first night, the two of them had barely spoken to each other. Now he put a hand on her shoulder, in a way that almost made her think he was going to tell her the whole thing was a huge mistake and ask her forgiveness.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he’d say. “You’re the woman I want to spend my life with. We made this family together.”

  “Can we talk?” he said.

  They sat on the couch by the woodstove. He must have bought a bottle of wine on his way home. He poured her a glass, then one for himself. Always, in the past, on those occasions when they’d bought wine, she’d set the cork aside, for cork people. This time, she just studied it, unable to imagine where any of them would be when the snow melted.

  “You know, this doesn’t have to be a tragedy,” he said to her. “We have so much to be grateful for. Three wonderful children.”

  She took a sip of her wine and looked into his eyes, trying to understand what he was saying.

  “If I had it all to do over, I’d marry you again,” he said. “You’ve been a wonderful mother to our children.”

  That was it? Her face must have betrayed how she took in what he said, because now he amended it.

  “And so much more.”

  Eleanor still just sat there, unable to speak.

  “The important part is that we stay friends,” he said. “I know we can do that. I have nothing but respect for you, El.”

  This would have been the moment she’d say the same thing back to him, only she couldn’t.

  “Let’s promise each other we’ll never speak unlovingly of each other to the children,” he said. “If we can do that, I think they’re all going to be fine.”

  She brought the wineglass to her lips and sipped deeply. She studied his face. Even now it still struck her by surprise sometimes what a handsome man he was, but for the first time she took in the fact that maybe he was no longer quite as handsome as he had been. His skin looked pale. He needed a haircut.

  “Sure,” she said. “That makes sense.”

  The next week, Eleanor announced a family meeting. She fixed the most comforting meal she knew, mac and cheese, and told the children they didn’t have to finish their broccoli to get dessert. She made brownies, their favorite.

  Watching the three of them around the table as they ate their meal (and first, as they sang grace, always the same song, “Simple Gifts”), she studied their faces, memorizing the sight of them. Hard events had taken place before this, and—less than a year earlier—a truly terrible one. But always before, their family had weathered them together. This was the last night their world would be intact.

  They had recently lived through a national disaster, of course: they had witnessed the spacecraft bearing their hero as it broke into a million pieces in front of their eyes. They had survived their brother’s accident and the long, sad chill that set in after, registered the tension between their parents—even noted, perhaps, that their parents seldom touched each other anymore, or met each other’s eyes, even.

  For all of this, they would still have said (or not even said it, because this was simply a fact of their lives, as real as the seasons—real as the earth under their feet or the fact that they would always live together at the end of this dead-end road) that they had two parents who loved each other. Maybe Ursula—the self-designated rescuer, their tireless cheerleader and mascot—worried about whether they were happy, and what to do if they weren’t. But even their parents’ increasingly apparent irritation with each other (their mother’s with their father, at least) was acceptable, so long as they were together.

  Their family—the circle made by the five of them as they held hands, singing grace around the table or touching fingers around Old Ashworthy—was the thing they had always believed they could count on forever. When they sat down to dinner that night, this was as much a fact of their lives as the air they breathed. By the time they went to bed all that would have changed.

  After the brownies, they cleared away the dishes together, folded the napkins, and carried the trash to the compost pile under the beam of Al’s high-powered flashlight. For the first time since the Challenger explosion, Ursula was talking about future plans—tryouts for the talent show, her book report on Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, a new girl who’d just joined their class.

  “They used to live in San Diego but her dad decided to leave his old job but maybe what actually happened, according to her, is he got fired on account of he drinks too much, and they couldn’t bring her dog because they don’t allow dogs at her apartment building but she’s hoping they can get a hamster,” Ursula was saying. Listening to her younger daughter tell the story, Eleanor thought about film footage they’d all watched a hundred times now, of the astronauts, smiling and waving as they headed toward the space shuttle that morning. No clue what was coming.

  She felt like a sniper. About to pick off an unsuspecting pedestrian, out walking her dog.

  “I was telling Juniper”—this was the new g
irl; she had hippie parents, evidently, perhaps fellow devotees of Spiritual Midwifery—“about the fort Al and me are going to build,” she said. “I was thinking we could invite her over and maybe have a sleepover.” There was also a fundraiser coming up at their school next Saturday with a three-legged race. The parents against the kids.

  Ursula actually looked happy again. Like her old self, almost.

  Eleanor shot a look in Cam’s direction. They could still change their minds. Maybe they didn’t have to go through with this after all. For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine an alternative to the scenario she’d been dreading. What if, even as they stood here on the precipice, about to jump, they might choose instead to turn back, descend the mountain, and make camp by some quiet stream? Begin again. Do better this time.

  Only they couldn’t. From the set of Cam’s jaw, the cool, even way he took his seat in the rocker by the fireplace, she knew he was resolved in his choice. This was Cam: a man who, once he made a decision, never looked back.

  At this very moment, maybe, he might be thinking about Coco. (And how, later, after their family meeting was over, he’d go out to his shop and call her. “I might not be able to see you for a while,” he’d tell her. “Till things settle down.”) He would have explained to Coco that this was the night they were telling the kids, and he’d be needing to give them a lot of extra attention in the days ahead.

  A picture came to Eleanor of Coco, off in her dorm room in Vermont—her long, beautiful legs folded under her, her beautiful long hair falling down her shoulders. A look of concern on her face. “How did the kids take it?” she’d ask.

  “Of course it was rough,” Cam would say. “But you know my kids. They’ll be okay. They love their mother. But they love you, too.”

  Eleanor imagined the next line. Cam’s voice, whispering low. Not as much as I do, of course.

  “The children will be fine. All they want is for us to be happy.”