It wasn’t anything they’d planned, but the children had positioned themselves on the couch in the order of their birth. They had brushed their teeth and put on their pajamas.
“Okay, guys,” Ursula said, having reclaimed her role as family cheerleader. “Mom and Dad have something to tell us.”
That night even Toby had an air of expectancy. Some big and surprising piece of news must be coming. A winter camping trip, maybe, or a new building project. Ever since visiting her friend Pamela, whose parents had a farm, Al had been lobbying hard for their family to get pygmy goats.
“You used to have one, Dad. Mom told us all about it. Opal, that you brought to the craft fair with a flower in her collar the day you and Mom fell in love.”
Maybe this would be the moment their parents would say, “Okay, then, let’s do it. Goats. But no more than six of them.”
The three of them sat there, each with their brownie, waiting for the family meeting to begin. Whatever the big news was that they were about to receive, they were ready.
Good morning to you. The first song Eleanor had taught to Alison. We’re all in our places, with bright shining faces.
Eleanor started it.
“You know we love you more than anything,” she told them. “We’re so proud of the three of you. You’re the best kids anyone ever had.”
Blah blah blah, she might as well say. Blah blah blah blah blah.
“But your father and I . . . we haven’t been . . . we’ve come to the decision—”
Eleanor hadn’t come to any decision. Cam did.
“It has nothing to do with the three of you.” This was his contribution.
Slow motion.
She watched their faces as they took in the words. A gradual crumbling. Like one of those time-lapse films of an avalanche, with the sides of a mountain caving in on itself, collapsing, until all that was left was a heap of snow. Somewhere in there, the word: “divorce.”
“We still care about each other,” Cam told them.
Blah blah blah.
“We’ll always be your parents. Everything that matters is going to stay exactly the same.”
Lie.
“Your mother and I just need a little space.”
Needing space. Where had Eleanor heard that one before?
“The important thing is, we love you so much.”
So if you love us so much, why would you do this to us? If you care about us more than anything, how could you let this happen?
“We know you probably feel very sad right now,” Eleanor said. “That’s natural. Maybe you have some things you’d like to ask us. Or just things you want to say.”
They had nothing to say, in fact. Then Ursula got up from the couch. “It’s time for Cosby,” she said. There was a happy family for you. The Huxtables.
Al had no interest in television. “I guess you’re done, right?” she said, when Eleanor had completed her speech. “So, can I go now?” She picked up her programming book and headed to her room. A minute later they could hear the sound of her Mandarin tape, and Al repeating the phrases.
Ursula’s eyes stayed fixed on the television—an episode in which Rudy Huxtable stole a pack of gum from a convenience store and her father, Dr. Huxtable, as portrayed by Bill Cosby, made her return it. Toby sat on the floor next to her, stacking blocks.
Eleanor was just clearing away the mugs from the hot chocolate she’d made for them when it happened. The reaction they had been bracing for, from the one of their children who would have seemed least likely to deliver it.
Toby. He shot up from his spot on the rug, as if a high-voltage electrical current had surged through his body. Or maybe it was more like magma, rising up from the center of the earth, finally reaching the surface and spewing hot, flaming lava in every direction. He knocked over the blocks. Then he flung himself on the ground. He let out a howl so primitive and raw a person might think it could only have come from a desperate animal, shot through the heart.
“You’re going to be all right, Tobes,” Eleanor said, kneeling on the floor next to him, not so differently from that other time, when she’d found him in the pond, though this time he fought back. With a force no one would expect from a five-year-old, he pushed her arms away, yanked her hair, kicked her in the stomach, the breasts. He lay there howling. In all the months since his pocketful of stones pulled him to the bottom of the pond, he had barely displayed a shred of emotion. Now came a torrent. Under other circumstances, this might have seemed like a hopeful development.
It lasted several minutes. When he was done, his body went limp. Eleanor picked him up and carried him to bed.
“It’s going to be okay, Toby. I promise. We’ll all still love each other.”
He said the same four words, over and over. The same ones Eleanor herself, though in possession of a vastly greater vocabulary, felt like speaking herself.
I want my family.
Later, she would always connect the end of her marriage with the Challenger explosion. As with that one, there had been warnings. That faulty O-ring. Nobody paid attention, was all.
One difference Eleanor had always recognized between herself and Cam: he had an amazing capacity to sail through life, even in difficult times, or awful ones. There was an ease about him, with which he shed old sorrow, always with the assumption that some new joy would replace it. Cam didn’t suffer injury or grief or anxiety as Eleanor did. He would not have spent a moment worrying over the loss of a Barbie shoe, and he seemed equally adept at sidestepping worries over a girl who bullied Toby on the playground, the looming specter of a tax bill they didn’t have the money to pay, letters from Alison’s teacher telling them that Alison—Al—appeared depressed.
“Maybe we should take her to a counselor?” Eleanor said.
“Or take her out for an ice cream cone,” he’d answered, grinning.
Sometimes Cam’s refusal to saddle himself with sadness or worry seemed like a gift, and a trait Eleanor wished she could emulate. Sometimes it left her feeling as though the weight of the world sat on her shoulders alone. Maybe the same thing that made him so enviably carefree also resulted in his maddening obliviousness. Life just didn’t seem so earthshakingly serious to Cam.
He wasn’t nostalgic about their past. “Why do I need to look back?” he said. “We’re in the present.” Old history, old injuries, pain, losses—they never stayed with him. Where everything that ever happened to Eleanor—her lonely childhood, her parents’ accident, that summer in Matt Hallinan’s car, and all the summers after, and all the other seasons—all that remained alive for Eleanor. Eleanor remembered everything and never let it go.
It was the gift, or curse, she brought to her artwork, too. She remembered perfectly that moment when the police car had appeared in the driveway with Charlie’s body lashed to the top. The picture remained clear enough that had she chosen to, she could have drawn it. She could still hear the sound of Mr. Guttenberg’s voice on the other side of the door the night he came to her dormitory room to tell her about the crash.
Most of all, the image she could never get out of her brain was of her son, facedown in the pond. And Cam, who was supposed to be watching, running down the hill.
It was that moment, and a thousand smaller ones leading up to it, that had hardened her heart. She might tell Darla that it was the affair with Coco that ended her marriage to Cam, but Eleanor knew it wasn’t, really. Cam’s falling in love with someone else was the symptom, not the cause. In Eleanor’s eyes, Cam would always be the one responsible for the worst thing that ever happened in their lives. What ended her marriage was her inability to forgive him for that.
It didn’t matter how many times he told her how sorry he was and how determined to become a better person, or that he—the same man who had once asked where they kept the diapers—had dedicated himself to the full-time job of overseeing Toby’s rehabilitation. It was still hard for Eleanor, just looking at his face—a fact noted by Ursula, who observed one day, at bre
akfast, “Mom, why do you always look in a different direction when Dad’s talking to you?”
Ursula never missed anything.
53.
Beyond Valentines
Valentine’s Day came and went, without the usual whirl of craft projects and strawberry desserts. Only Ursula followed through in delivering cards that year, and only to her parents. “Love!,” she wrote, in letters so big they barely fit on the paper. Less a celebration than a plea.
Cam and Eleanor still lived under the same roof, but barely spoke to each other now. If Cam bumped into Eleanor, passing in the kitchen, he said, “Excuse me.” Eleanor, seeing him walk in the door now, as she stood at the sink, stepped away to another room. It was as if just breathing the same air hurt.
Someone was leaving. Someone was staying. The situation was clearly terminal. They were standing around waiting for the last breath of their marriage. They were beyond valentines.
After the discovery of Cam’s affair, and his announcement that he didn’t love her anymore, Eleanor might have told him to move out. She would have had legal grounds for that. Moral ones, anyway.
But that would have meant staying on in a place where every room offered reminders of the life they didn’t have anymore. More than any place on earth, this was the one that had represented her safe harbor. Since the days of their children’s births she had pictured them getting married here someday, grandchildren running through the field. Someday, far from now, she had imagined her ashes and Cam’s scattered under the great tree. But the idea of staying alone with the children, in the house where they had been born, overlooking the field where two parents no longer married to each other had spoken their vows, seemed impossibly sad.
She had made her home on this farm. She could not imagine a home she would ever love as much as she had loved this one, and because this was true, it hardly mattered where she located herself next, except that it had to be somewhere her children could feel safe. She had found something she’d never known before, living on this dead-end road with the father of her children—a sense of home. But she saw no way of staying on here now, when every room—and the field beyond, and the vegetable garden, and the studio, and the pond (that, most of all)—triggered memories of the life she didn’t have anymore.
She remembered as clearly as if it had been yesterday that first afternoon she saw the house with the old Realtor, Ed. The wide-board floors. The beam where, every Fourth of July, a few generations of Murchisons had penciled in the heights of their children and fired off the miniature cannon afterward. The little knoll at the foot of the field where Cam and Eleanor and their children had planted a row of firs to serve as their Christmas trees for the next thirty years.
This year, same as always, they’d tromped through the snow together to chop down their tree and put it up, as always, in the corner opposite the fireplace. She had chosen her children’s gifts so carefully this past Christmas, as she always did—as if locating a Cabbage Patch doll for Ursula or getting the Commodore 64 for Al would ensure their happiness. (Toby was another story. Toby didn’t care what you gave him anymore.)
Then came the next part: how, with her three children watching, standing frozen among the newly opened presents, the twinkling lights, she had picked up the platter holding the precious cake she’d spent the last three hours constructing and smashed the whole thing into the trash.
So much for protecting your children. So much for ensuring their happiness.
If Cam had been the type to hold on to old injuries, as Eleanor did, he might have blamed her forever for that one, but she was guessing that if you said to him now, “That was pretty awful, what your wife did that time with the bûche de Noël,” he might not even remember.
Eleanor remembered everything, and it was the fact that she did that made her know: she had to leave this place.
Her lawyer told her not to do it. But if she was sure she had to leave the property, he told her, they’d need to hire an appraiser, settle on a figure as to its current market value. Once they had this, they’d know the figure Cam had to come up with to buy her out. Fifty percent of whatever the farm was worth.
How was anybody supposed to calculate that one? What was her home worth? Everything, if a happy family lived in it. Otherwise, nothing.
She knew this, too: whatever figure an appraiser came up with for the farm, there was no way Cam could buy her out. Cam earned almost nothing. Their savings—though he’d be entitled to half—amounted to a little over a thousand dollars.
With her syndicated strip gone, she was just getting by on her freelance jobs, and Toby’s school and speech therapy had wiped out the money she’d saved from her days as a bestselling author of children’s books. There was no way Eleanor could afford a house of her own without the money from the buyout. Still, the thought of selling the farm—even if she never got to live there again—was like imagining a death.
The agreement they came to gave Cam nine years to figure out how he might buy out Eleanor’s share of their farm. Meanwhile, he’d assume the mortgage and Eleanor would rent a place somewhere else. “I’m not endorsing this,” her attorney told her. “Frankly, I think it’s a lousy deal for you. Nine years. Your ex-husband’s a smart guy. Maybe he’ll come up with something. Either that or his parents will kick the bucket and he’ll inherit some cash. Or maybe they’ll bail him out.”
The document they drew up left it that when Alison turned eighteen Eleanor and Cam would have the farm appraised. At that point Cam would be obligated to pay Eleanor half of that figure, to take over full ownership of the property. Failing this, it would be put on the market.
“Not that it’s my business, but you need to promise me,” her attorney said. “The day your older daughter turns eighteen you’re demanding full payment on the buyout. If your ex-husband can’t do it, you put up the For Sale sign.”
Eleanor signed the document. So did Cam.
“I don’t understand why you and Dad have to do this,” Ursula said. Speaking of the divorce.
Ursula was always the negotiator, the peacemaker. As for Al, she seemed to have shut them all out. When she got home from school now, she headed to her room and barely emerged, except when called for meals. This left Ursula to be the children’s spokesperson.
“Can’t you two just sign up for some counseling?” she said. “You could go on a romantic vacation together, just the two of you. Al and me could take care of everything. Phyllis could drive us places. And Coco can come over on weekends when she’s home from college and play soccer.”
They all loved Coco. She’d make things right. That’s how the children had seen her before. And still did.
54.
Why Would You Blow Up Our Life?
Eleanor had assumed the next thing to happen, after they delivered the news of their divorce, would be an announcement to the children, from Cam, that he and Coco were a couple now. As much as she wanted to spare their children pain, maybe Eleanor looked forward to that moment. The girls would hate Coco then. They’d be angry with their father. As angry at him as Eleanor was.
But the announcement never came.
Maybe Cam was right that telling the children about his relationship with Coco at this point would be too hard for them. But the result of his not telling them made for a different kind of trouble that fell on Eleanor’s shoulders.
Because Eleanor was the one moving out, they saw her as the one responsible. Their mother was leaving their father. That’s how it looked, and Cam said nothing to disabuse them of this idea. And Eleanor, though she wished she could explain, believed that by doing so, she would become that person she vowed never to be: the bitter parent who poisons her children against their other parent. She and Cam had promised each other they’d never speak ill of each other. Adhering to the promise meant, for Eleanor, holding her tongue about Cam having fallen in love with their babysitter.
Now there was this: having told Eleanor he was in love with Coco, suddenly she was nowhere to be seen—of
f in Vermont, attending her school for holistic studies, evidently. From a conversation Eleanor had with her mother, Betsy, when the two of them ran into each other at the food co-op, it was clear to Eleanor that Coco’s parents knew nothing of her relationship with Cam, either. She was eighteen now, but Eleanor doubted that Betsy and Evan would be happy if they knew their daughter was involved with a man almost twenty years older, a father of three.
Al was the first to express her anger toward Eleanor. Eleanor had been making one of those speeches parents getting divorced deliver to their children, that she and Cam still cared about each other and that nothing was the children’s fault, and nobody was going to love them any less. She went so far as to suggest things might be better for the three of them without the tension of their parents’ fighting.
Eleanor hated the sound of her own voice, saying these things. But not as much as Ursula did.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Ursula said, covering her ears, when Eleanor had launched into her most recent attempt at reassuring them.
“You’ll see,” Eleanor said. “We’re going to make this work. The most important thing will always be you three.”
“If we’re so fucking important,” Al said, “why would you blow up our life?”
(She said “fucking.” She used that word. She must have known that under the circumstances, Eleanor was not about to give her a hard time for using bad language. This was the children’s moment to give her a hard time. As hard a time as they chose.)
“I want you to tell me your feelings,” Eleanor said, another time. The four of them had been driving somewhere—Al’s basketball practice, probably—and for fifteen minutes, nobody had spoken a word.
“You’re leaving our family,” Ursula said—all the usual softness and love absent from her tone. “How do you think we feel?”
“You need to tell them the truth,” Darla urged Eleanor. “Don’t you see you’re protecting this guy? The jerk cheated on you with the fucking babysitter, and still you’re letting him look good to your kids. Like you’re the bad mother and he’s the poor innocent victim you abandoned.”
Count the Ways Page 24
