Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  75.

  The Advantages of Forgetting

  Her children never wanted to come to Brookline anymore, and Eleanor no longer pushed it. Every Saturday now, she made the trip to Akersville to see which of her children she might persuade to go out for lunch with her or—if the weather was good—on a picnic. Mostly, the one who’d be up for this was Toby. In winter, they’d make snowballs and line them up in rows. In spring he liked to go to Agway and look at the baby chicks in the incubator or, when it wasn’t the season for chicks, to study the tools. In summertime, he wanted to go to some lake or other. He didn’t swim, but he liked to put his feet in the water.

  “Webbed foot,” he said, when Eleanor untied his shoes for him. He liked the feeling of the mud on his toes.

  A man in town had a collection of old Mack trucks in his yard that Eleanor and Toby liked to check out. It didn’t matter if they’d been there the week before. He was always happy at Sorley’s Truck Museum. They’d climb into the cabs of Toby’s favorites—an old dump truck from the forties and a snowplow and a fire engine—to work the manual windshield wipers, and after, he would sign the guest book Mr. Sorley had set up in the yard, tied to a post, with a pencil alongside. The names went back almost thirty years. Not many people visited the truck museum anymore. Mostly, the names in the visitor’s book were theirs.

  Sometimes she took Toby fishing at a spot below the waterfall, the same place where, years before, they used to launch their little homemade boats bearing the cork people. The same place she’d first met Timmy Pouliot when he was about the age her son was now.

  One day, sitting next to her by the water, Toby had set down his pole suddenly and looked at her with a kind of intensity in his gaze that she had not seen since before the accident.

  “Boats,” he said. “We put boats in the water.”

  It was like the runoff after the spring thaw—the way a pine cone, or a boatload of cork people, that had gotten wedged among the weeds suddenly came dislodged, and once it did, how the water carried it, bobbing and tumbling, over the rocks. A memory buried in the mud of Toby’s damaged brain had returned to him. Memories being, for Toby, the rarest commodity.

  “That’s right,” she told him. “We made little people out of corks with toothpicks stuck in them and put them in paper boats to be the passengers. You thought up names for them all. We ran alongside the brook watching them go. There was this one called Bob. Another was Elvis.”

  A look came over her son’s face, as if a door had opened somewhere, that had been shut for a long time.

  “One time,” she told him, “your boat tipped over and all your cork people fell out. You had them belted in with rubber bands, but they fell out anyway. Your sisters and I tried so hard to comfort you, but you cried all the way home.”

  “Cork people,” he said dreamily. “Nobody sees them anymore, but the cork people are still down there someplace.” In eight years, this might have been the most he’d ever said.

  It was like what happens when the clouds covering the sun part all of a sudden to let the light through. Just for a moment. That was how it felt seeing Toby as he was at that moment, when the memory returned to him. It occurred to Eleanor that everything that happened was inside him still. Just deep underwater. Water, or mud.

  Toby went back to his fishing then. Whatever glimpse he had been given, for that one brief moment, of their long-ago lives, it was gone again—the memories of Bob and Crystal and Elvis, Betty and Pamela and Harriet.

  Sometimes, Eleanor reflected, it might be better for a person to remember less.

  76.

  The Last Cubs Fan

  At the supermarket sometime in late winter—a quick stop to pick up groceries on her way home from seeing the children—shopping in the way Eleanor did now, one small meal at a time—a familiar-looking person caught her attention. Familiar, but not.

  He was standing in the canned-foods aisle: a tall figure, so gaunt it would not have been difficult to imagine his clothes falling off his body onto the linoleum. At first she couldn’t see his face—just thin fingers reaching up for a can of soup. But even from the back, she recognized something about him. The slumping shoulders, maybe. Thin wisps of hair sticking out under a baseball cap—an odd choice, for this time of year.

  It took a minute to place him. It was the cap that did it—a red C in a blue circle, rare for a person making his home in Red Sox country. The fingers were so much thinner now, but she had seen that hand before. Reaching for a softball.

  Harry Botts had been a Cubs fan. A Chicago native, he had chosen, as his team, one with a worse hard-luck story than even the Red Sox. Eleanor remembered how, years ago, Harry had talked about his team back home and his eternal hope for a pennant.

  It had only been three years since Eleanor had seen him. In the old days, he’d been a little chubby. He was skeletal now. When he turned around, hearing her call out his name, his skin seemed to be stretched over his skull like a sheet that doesn’t fit the bed, and it was mottled with odd-looking black splotches.

  She knew what it was. The disease everyone was so terrified about. AIDS.

  Some people said you got the virus from touching a person who had it. But there was no way, seeing her ex-husband’s old teammate like this, that Eleanor wasn’t going to put her arms around him.

  “Oh, Harry,” she said. No point asking, “How’ve you been?”

  “You recognized me,” he said. “Most people don’t.”

  “How many Cubs fans do you think there are in this town, anyway?” she said.

  “One, for now,” he said. “Maybe one less in the near future.”

  He was carrying one of those baskets you use, shopping, if you were only picking up a few items. All he had in it: Jell-O and five cans of Campbell’s soup.

  “I don’t get out much,” he said. “Just laying in supplies.”

  “Not a lot of protein there,” she said. “Let me take you out to dinner. Buy you a steak.”

  He shook his head. “I have these sores in my mouth,” he told her, indicating the contents of his basket. “This is about as much as I can handle.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she told him. “Is there someone helping you?”

  “My mom,” he said. “Kind of ironic, actually. She was the whole reason I came here. To get away. But when she figured out what was going on she flew in from Illinois.”

  After he got sick, Harry had tried to keep the record store open for a few months, he told her. But even when his health was good he never had that much business. Once word of his illness got out—my situation, he called it—nobody came in the store anymore. He had sold off the last of his inventory a month or so back.

  “Selling old vinyl records was my big dream,” he told her. “That and the Cubbies taking the pennant, and playing with a bunch of guys on a softball team.”

  “Two out of three, anyway,” Eleanor said. “I’ll never forget that amazing catch you made. Nobody who was there that night ever will.”

  “That was something, wasn’t it?” he said. “I can still remember what it felt like when that ball landed in my glove. I was just so amazed, all I could do was stand there.”

  “We were all so happy.”

  “I was a pretty terrible ballplayer,” he said.

  “It’s funny how things work,” Eleanor observed. “At the time, you think it’s about whether or not you win the game. After, you figure it out. That part doesn’t even matter anymore. The great thing is, you caught that ball.”

  77.

  Reply Hazy, Try Again

  Back when her attorney drew up the settlement papers in the divorce, the date they’d arrived at for the buyout of their farm had seemed far away, the idea of their oldest child going off to college, unimaginable. The official deadline for Cam to buy out Eleanor’s share of the farm—Al’s eighteenth birthday—was just two years away now, but it was clear that Cam would never come up with the money. Eleanor just hadn’t been able to bring herself to call the lawyer.
Meanwhile, though Eleanor hadn’t set foot in her old house since the day of the event she still thought of as the Great Children’s Book Heist, her name remained on the title, alongside her ex-husband’s. The idea of forcing Cam to sell the property—knowing what that would mean to their children—filled her with dread.

  It was late in February, a few days after Al turned sixteen, and Eleanor had picked Al up from school to bring her to the DMV for her driving test. In the car on the way over, she’d tried a few times to get Al talking—about school, basketball, a science project she was working on. Al had told her recently about a program she hoped to attend that summer where they taught advanced skills in computer programming, a concept as remote from Eleanor’s world as professional wrestling or bungee jumping.

  “It costs a thousand dollars,” Al told her. “But I know I’m going to make a lot of money someday as a programmer. When I do I can pay you back. I’m going to have my own computer company.”

  Eleanor wrote the check. She took on a job for a commuter airline that needed drawings depicting the correct manner to attach one’s oxygen mask in the event of a loss of pressure in the plane. When the airline liked that one, she did a second series of drawings, illustrating evacuation on a body of water. Her two least favorite jobs ever.

  The computer school Al wanted to attend was in upstate New York. “I still don’t get the idea of sending a kid off to a place where she’s going to spend all day sitting at a computer terminal,” Cam said, when she picked Al up to drive her there. This represented more than his usual level of communication. All business, as usual.

  “It’s what Al loves, Cam,” Eleanor said. She had volunteered to bring Al to camp chiefly because she knew Cam never would, but she had also been looking forward to time with her daughter in the car. She’d bring Ursula and Toby along. They’d make a family trip of it.

  Al had the headphones on for much of her drive. But somewhere around the New York border the batteries on her Walkman ran out. Ursula was reading a magazine. Toby, in the front seat next to her, had been holding his Magic 8 Ball, turning it around in his hands, studying the fortunes, not that he could read what they said. Ursula did that for him.

  “Are we going to stop at McDonald’s?” he asked the 8 Ball.

  “Cannot predict now.”

  “Will I ever get a pet monkey?”

  “Signs point to yes.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about something,” Eleanor said to them. She had been thinking about this ever since the Vermont border. Now felt like the moment.

  “It’s looking like your father might not be able to come up with the money to buy out my half of the farm,” Eleanor said—her voice even, no evidence in it of the anxiety she felt addressing this topic. “I hope he can, but it’s a lot of money for him. He might not manage it.”

  “What are you talking about?” This was Al speaking. Instantly on her guard. All three children had learned long ago that conversations in which their mother got onto the topic of their father and money meant trouble. No doubt Al was wishing she’d brought an extra set of batteries along on the trip so she could get back to playing music on her Walkman.

  “I’m going to need that money,” Eleanor said. “For you guys.”

  “We don’t care about clothes and trips,” Al said. “None of that stuff matters.”

  “I’m talking about paying for college, and your brother’s schooling,” Eleanor said. She could have mentioned computer camp but knew that if she did, Al would only say she didn’t really want to go anyway. She would not put it past Al to jump out of the car. As it was, her older daughter just stared out the window.

  “Money, money, money. I’m sick of money,” Ursula said. “I just want to be happy.”

  “I just want to go to McDonald’s,” Toby said.

  Deep breath. Eyes on the road.

  “So . . . it’s possible . . . if your dad can’t pay the money . . . that we’d need to put the farm up for sale.”

  There was no good place to deliver this news. She’d chosen the car because there was no way for the three of them, taking in the words from inside the station wagon, in the middle of the New York State Thruway, to walk away from her.

  “You can’t sell the farm,” Al said. “That’s not okay. It’s horrible. We won’t let you.”

  “You didn’t even ask what we think.” This was Ursula.

  “I hate the idea of selling the farm as much as you do, honey,” Eleanor said. “But I might not have a choice.”

  “Oh, right,” Al said. Her voice dripped with contempt.

  “School costs a lot of money. Everything does. Right now I don’t even own the home I’m living in and I want to have a place of my own someday. But the main thing is you guys. Your education. Your security.”

  “We don’t care about school,” Ursula said. “We don’t care about any of that other stuff.”

  “You can’t make us leave the farm. And Dad and Coco and Elijah and Buster.” Al again.

  The tree fort. The animals. The woodshop. Their moss bed, and the lady’s slippers. Old Ashworthy. The pond.

  It was probably just as well Eleanor had to keep her eyes on the highway. If she had been able to look at her daughters’ faces, she knew what she would see.

  “You make me sick,” Al told her.

  “Honey . . .” she said. Honey what? What could she say that would make her children feel any differently? Nothing.

  “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe it. You’re crazy. You’re mean.” This was Ursula.

  It was Al who delivered the final blow, the one that flattened her. She spoke from the back seat, her voice hard and low—no yelling, just a deadly whisper.

  “If you make our dad leave our house we’ll never forgive you,” she told Eleanor. “We’ll hate you for the rest of our lives.”

  Al put the headphones back on. Her Walkman might be dead, but she would shut her mother out anyway.

  There was nothing to say after that. With the exception of once, a half hour later, when Eleanor asked Ursula to take some quarters out of her purse to pay for the toll, and another time, when Toby asked Al to read what the Magic 8 Ball told them in answer to the question “Is God real?” (“Reply hazy, try again”), they rode the rest of the way to computer camp in silence.

  The appraisal on the farm came in at just over three hundred thousand dollars, meaning that to buy her out, Cam needed to pay Eleanor half that figure. There was no way he’d manage even a tenth of this—no way he could pay her anything. There had been a time when his father might have helped him out with money, but Eleanor had gathered, from the children, that their grandfather had suffered a stroke and required round-the-clock care now. All of the family money was spoken for.

  Computer camp lasted a month. If Eleanor had supposed her daughter might have softened her position by the time she came home, she was mistaken.

  Four weeks after dropping Al off at camp, Eleanor drove west again to pick her up—this time, without the other children. Getting in the car, with her Walkman and her duffel bag, Al said nothing until they were out on the highway. Then, surprisingly, she took off her headphones.

  “Are you still going to try and make our dad sell our farm? Because if so, I’ll find my own way home.”

  The next day, Eleanor called her attorney. “I want to sign off on my rights to the farm,” she said.

  Silence on the other end of the line. She paid two hundred dollars an hour for moments like these.

  “Do you know what you’re saying, Eleanor?” he asked her. “You’re walking away from a six-figure asset. You understand that, right?”

  That wasn’t the half of it. She drove over to his office that afternoon to sign the paperwork.

  Her old home was gone that swiftly. A visit to the lawyer’s office. A signature on a piece of paper. She was out the door in ten minutes.

  The farm at the end of the long dead-end road wasn’t hers anymore.

  After it was done, she called Ti
mmy Pouliot.

  “I know you’ve got a girlfriend,” she told him. “But is there any chance you could take me out on your bike for an hour? Strictly friends. No need to lend me a helmet.” She wanted to feel the wind in her hair.

  “Let’s go fast,” she told him.

  78.

  Like Dating Your Own Children

  If Eleanor had expected Al or Ursula to express gratitude for her decision to sign over the farm, she would have had a disappointment in store, but she knew better. The girls didn’t seem to pay much attention to what she’d done, though if she had taken the other course of action presented to her, they would have had plenty to say, and none of it good.

  “You’re nuts,” Darla told her, when she heard about Eleanor signing over the farm.

  “I couldn’t bear having my daughters hate me,” she said.

  She had told Cam her decision on a weekend visit to Akersville to bring Toby to the truck museum.

  “That’s a beautiful gesture,” he told her, carrying a bushel of zucchini in from the garden, Elijah running alongside him. He barely broke his stride. Of all of them, the one who seemed to recognize best what it had meant to Eleanor to give away her rights to the property was Coco.

  “You don’t know what this place means to us,” she said, taking Eleanor’s hand.

  “Oh, I do, actually,” Eleanor told her. “The same thing it meant to me.”

  Not long after she signed over the farm, at one of Al’s baseball games, she had spotted her old neighbor Walt, sitting in a folding chair, a blanket over his knees.

  “I hear those two ended up with your farm,” he said to her. “Don’t know how that happened. Just figured I’d express my regrets. I know how hard you worked, taking care of that place. All you put into it.”

  “Oh, well,” Eleanor said. “A home is only as good as the life you live inside it, right?”

  “Still,” he said. “I remember how it was, you moving in all by yourself. What were you, nineteen? Twenty?”