The truck driver was drunk, he told her. The motorcycle they were riding ended up on the whole other side of the highway.
Somewhere in there Eleanor thought to ask, “What about the guy driving the motorcycle?” Coco’s boyfriend, the man for whom she’d left Cam.
DOA.
It wasn’t until the next day that she read, online, the newspaper story about the accident, with a photograph of the mangled motorcycle Coco had been riding on and the name of the man who’d been driving it. Timothy Pouliot.
Sitting at her desk, her hands shaking, she googled his obituary.
All this time, Timmy Pouliot had remained, in Eleanor’s mind, a perpetual boy, but he’d been forty-eight years old. Survivors included his mother, Ruth, a brother, Ray, three sisters, Carol Anne, Jill, and Anita. Twelve nieces and nephews.
Eleanor studied the photograph in the newspaper. Black and white, it failed to convey Timmy’s most striking feature. The extraordinary blue of his eyes.
She thought about a night a few years back, not the last time she’d seen Timmy Pouliot—when, she now guessed, he must already have been seeing Coco, and panicked at the sight of Eleanor—but the time before that. It was in a sports bar near Fenway Park. She’d run into him on one of those awful dates she kept going on for a while with men she met online. Timmy must have come into town to see a Red Sox game.
She was heading to the ladies’ room, counting the minutes for the evening to be over, so she could say goodbye forever to Phil, the orthodontist, who looked ten years older and forty pounds heavier than his picture on Match.com. She had just spent an interminable ninety minutes listening to him talk about dental implants. All she wanted was to get back home.
Leaned against the bar watching the postgame wrap-up, he had spotted her. He’d been alone. Funny how, that night, he had no longer been Timmy Pouliot to Eleanor. Just Timmy.
It was getting close to off-season, that time of year when Timmy found himself between girlfriends. His face lit up when he saw Eleanor.
“I didn’t think you hung out in places like this,” he said to her.
“I’m on a date,” she told him. “But not for long.”
“I would have brought you here,” he told her. “If you’d let me. I would have brought you someplace nicer.”
He set his bottle down on the bar. Behind him on the screen they were playing game highlights. The Red Sox slaughtering the San Diego Padres. He’d always looked so young, but that night he didn’t.
“I would have taken you anywhere,” he told her.
She had studied his face then as if for the first time. All those Friday nights she’d spent in his apartment, times he ran a bath for her and sat on the edge of the tub or the toilet seat, listening to her stories about what was going on with her marriage, what was going on with her children, what was going on with the farm—sometimes just letting her cry, and after, when he held her, and they made love. Looking back now over those times, she realized they had been the best times she’d ever known with a man.
It had never occurred to Eleanor that Timmy Pouliot could be anything other than a sweet boy who used to play softball with the man she used to be married to, who had swept her away on his motorcycle when she needed to disappear.
“You were always my dream girl, you know,” he said to Eleanor that night at the bar.
“You need to find somebody your own age and have a couple of kids with her,” she told him. “And anyway, I’m not your type.”
“What type would that be, exactly?” he’d asked her. “Did you think there was some set of rules out there to tell you how love works?”
She did, actually. All these years, she had supposed there was a rule book out there on how things were supposed to go in relationships. She just never got a copy. She had been so busy assuming she got everything wrong that she totally missed it when the possibility was revealed to her that maybe there had been something very good going on, or something good enough, anyway, right in front of her. Or two flights up. On a waterbed.
97.
Invitation to a Wedding
Elijah called the next morning. Evan and Betsy were there at the hospital with him, and Toby, who had insisted on being there with his brother. At first it had appeared they’d need to amputate Coco’s leg, but in the end they managed to save it. A team of surgeons put two metal rods in her. Then came another surgery for her broken pelvis and broken jaw.
When Elijah called Eleanor again a few days later, the news was better. His mother was going to be all right, more or less. No more cartwheels. She’d walk with a limp, but she’d walk.
“I guess I won’t be coming to Brookline for a while,” Elijah told Eleanor. “My mom’s going to need me.”
He stayed with Coco at her parents’ house after she got out of the hospital. Six months later, she moved somewhere in upstate New York with a girlfriend of hers who ran a spa and gave her a job. She couldn’t stay on her feet long enough to give massage, but she could sit at the front desk. The band that had just hired Elijah got a recording contract, and he moved to L.A.
Cam remained on the farm with Toby, of course, working with his physical therapy clients. Eleanor hardly ever went to L.A. anymore, though she flew out once, when Elijah’s band opened at the Hollywood Bowl.
Ursula and Jake were having another baby. Eleanor heard this from Toby and Elijah, who visited them in Vermont sometimes, but Eleanor herself heard nothing from her daughter. The more hopeful news was that after more than five years in which there had been no communication other than a card on her birthday and one on Mother’s Day, Al had started calling Eleanor up, checking in with her, talking about the software company he’d started and his life with Teresa, asking about hers. The first time he’d called, out of the blue, they had spoken only briefly—the conversation uneasy. Then he was calling more. She knew the name of his dog, and that he and Teresa had taken a trip to Oaxaca, and that his start-up was doing so well, he and Teresa were buying a building outside Seattle. One time he asked Eleanor if she’d send him the recipe for her spaghetti carbonara. “We’ve tried making it, Mom,” he told her. “But it never turns out as good as yours.”
You could say this was a whole new person she was getting to know. Or you could say he was the person he’d been all along—just happy, finally. What mattered was, he’d found someone he loved, someone who loved him, and they were getting married. Families didn’t always look the way you pictured them. And even if they did, that was just about never the real story.
“Don’t you think it’s about time we saw each other?” Eleanor asked him one Sunday. “Soon, I promise,” he told her. Three days later, the invitation to his wedding arrived.
98.
Together Again, Whatever That Means
The ceremony was set for 2:00 P.M. on a Saturday in late June. The card announcing the event included directions to the farm. As if Eleanor needed them.
That morning she checked the weather on her phone. There were predictions of thundershowers and lightning, and out the window, the sky confirmed the possibility. Eleanor’s old self—the one who had actually tried to control her children’s universe and spare them all pain—would have felt anxious at the thought of rain falling on Al’s wedding day, but she wasn’t that person anymore. Or at least, whatever aspects of that old habit endured, she recognized their pointlessness. A parent could no more protect her children from sorrow and loss than she could keep the sun from setting, or rising again the next day.
She took her time getting dressed. Best not to overdo it, particularly if rain fell. Likewise, though she had noticed, a few days earlier, that her hair was overdue for coloring, she left it as it was. There would be people at this gathering ready to view her as a wealthy outsider, gone Hollywood. There would be other women in attendance with graying hair and unfashionable dresses. She’d rather fit in the best she could than stand out, and though, when she reflected on seeing Cam again, she felt an impulse to look good, she knew they were beyond al
l that. This was Al and Teresa’s day.
Years had passed since Eleanor had seen Al, but she wasn’t worried about seeing him now. Their conversations over the last year or two had become more frequent and more relaxed. Al, as he was now, seemed a lot more comfortable in his relationship with her—probably because he was more comfortable with himself—than he had been when she’d seen him as Alison.
He was not the only one who’d changed. More and more over the years, without anyone suggesting this, Eleanor had found herself avoiding the words “she” or “her” when speaking of Al. This was awkward sometimes. But in her mind, Eleanor understood now, as well as a person could for whom the concept of transitioning to a whole other gender had been, until recently, utterly foreign. She was the mother of two sons and a daughter. Her oldest child was a man.
The more difficult part about the day ahead, for Eleanor, lay in the prospect of seeing Ursula again. And Louise. Except for pictures Elijah showed her now and then and a family Christmas card with nothing but the words “Happy Holidays from Our Family to Yours,” Eleanor had not seen her daughter or granddaughter since Louise was three days old. Unlike Al, who had been calling every week, Eleanor had not heard Ursula’s voice in three years. She had no idea what words might come out of her daughter when she saw her today.
So here she was again, on all these familiar roads she’d traveled before, once as a girl in the front seat of a Realtor’s car, once in the front seat of a U-Haul truck with Walt, moving her possessions to a new home in Massachusetts. Later again, as a divorced woman on her own, heading back to drop her children off on a Friday night.
She turned on the radio. Every station on the dial seemed to be playing nothing but Michael Jackson songs. Then she heard the news. He had died—Toby’s favorite singer, before he didn’t have a favorite singer anymore. Though it was Michael Jackson who dominated the news, the broadcast also reported the death of Farrah Fawcett—the woman whose face had smiled down at Eleanor every time she took a bath in Timmy Pouliot’s tub. She was so young in that picture. But not as young as Michael Jackson, on the radio now, singing “ABC.”
Downtown Akersville was barely recognizable from the place she’d driven into over thirty-six years ago. (The Watergate hearings on the radio. Phyllis Schlafly, sounding the alarm bell that the Equal Rights Amendment would destroy the lives of American housewives. And “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.” “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” “Killing Me Softly.”)
There had been no stoplight in town back then, and no need for one, but there was a nail salon and two different pizza parlors on Main Street now and—this struck her as funny—a dry-cleaning establishment, the business her ex–father-in-law had offered to set his son up in, that might have offered more in the way of an income than selling hand-turned wooden bowls. (How many parents, like Cam’s, failed to recognize who their children were? She had been guilty of this herself for way too long, with her oldest child, her daughter who always wanted to be her son.)
She passed the lake where they’d gone skating, back in the days before they built the pond, the field where she used to bring Toby, which used to be full of the old Mack trucks he loved to climb, the town dump, where she and her children scavenged for treasures, the bowling alley in whose parking lot they used to recite the No-Cry Pledge.
As she got closer to the farm, Eleanor’s car was joined on the road by others—more than the usual number of vehicles for these parts, on account of the wedding, probably. There would be locals in attendance, Eleanor figured—old neighbors she’d recognize from years before when everyone was young (but not the one she would have wanted most to see, Walt). Also a couple from Seattle, friends of Al and Teresa, who had brought their infant twins, and some high-level programmers from the start-up where Al had previously worked in Silicon Valley. Teresa’s family was there in force, of course. A large group of them had rented an RV to make the trip east from Texas, a sticker on the back: Dios te bendiga.
The last half mile of road was lined with signs letting guests know they were getting close. “Don’t give up, you’re almost there.” “Look out for snapping turtles.” The old “Deaf Child” sign still stood at the corner, having been there since the first time Eleanor ever visited the farm, though whoever that deaf child had been was probably in her forties now.
Then came the turnoff for the road Eleanor knew so well. The “Cam and Coco” sign had been taken down, though the one remained that said simply, “Namaste.”
Someone had strung papel picado across the entrance to the property. From farther down the road, Eleanor could make out the sound of Latin music—an unlikely mix, but that’s what happened when a marriage took place: it didn’t just connect two individuals, it brought families together.
One of the things Eleanor had always loved about the dirt road leading up to the house was the strip down the middle where grass grew. Driving very slowly now, Eleanor reached the place on the road where the house came into view, and the particular spot where she used to say, out loud, “I’m home.” Silent now, she drove the last stretch to the field where they’d set up signs, “Park Here.” Elijah, in a suit he probably got at a thrift shop—too big, but the sleeves were short for him; he had his father’s long-limbed build—directed traffic. Eleanor took a deep breath (cleansing breath? Was that what they called it here?) and pulled into the designated space. She stepped out onto the grass.
There was the house, looking better cared for than she remembered. Tubs of daisies and brown-eyed Susans had been placed on the granite slab by the front door—Ursula’s touch, probably. To the right of the driveway lay the pond, with lupine in bloom around the edges, from seeds Eleanor and the children gathered on a long-ago trip to Maine.
Memory took her back to the summer Buck Hollingsworth had spent digging the hole. Every morning at seven he got to work, scooping dirt out as her children danced around the edges, naked in the mud, watching as the hole slowly filled with water over the course of one glorious summer. (Two of her children did this, anyway. Maybe Alison’s self-consciousness had come from a feeling Eleanor hadn’t understood at the time. That the body she inhabited never felt like the one she was intended to have.)
Now came another picture, the one that never left her. Toby, facedown. Ursula screaming. Cam running toward their son, then pumping his stomach. The siren. The ambulance pulling up. And from Toby, nothing.
There was a band playing now. Men with large guitars and black suits singing in Spanish—an unlikely scene, unlikely sound, to encounter in this place. A crowd gathered at an outdoor folding table, getting their drinks. Margaritas, maybe. She could use one.
Walking up the path to the tent they’d set up for the meal after the ceremony, Eleanor saw for the first time the new structure Cam and Coco had built a few years back for their physical therapy and massage practice, with the living space above it—more energy-efficient than the old house. There was a deck looking out over the field. Gardens. A chicken coop. Toby’s beloved goats.
Inside the tent, they had set up tables—a vase of flowers on every one, and on each a small Mexican retablo. It was a good idea that they’d be eating under cover; the sky was darkening, and in the distance, Eleanor heard the rumble of thunder.
The first one to greet her was Elijah, who’d evidently flown in a couple of days earlier from L.A., where he was living now. Eleanor had heard from Toby that Elijah was getting lots of work. “My brother’s a rock star,” Toby told her.
Elijah put his arms around Eleanor. “Al’s out on the porch getting ready,” he said. “He asked me to bring you back to say hello before the ceremony. Ursula’s there, too, with Louise.”
It was probably a good thing that there were all these people around—some from down the road, some from Texas and Mexico, some from Seattle and Silicon Valley, along with one or two of Cam’s relatives. Young women with pink hair. Young men wearing dresses. Stout Latin men with silver belt buckles. Nerdy millennials, instantly identifiable as programmer
s. She spotted Darla’s daughter, Kimmie, who’d flown in from Las Vegas with her new baby.
“If only . . .” Eleanor said.
The two of them stood there for a long time then with their arms around each other. No need to say anything more.
Kimmie had just taken off to change her daughter’s diaper when Eleanor spotted Al. He was surrounded by his best men—Teresa’s brothers, and Toby—adjusting their boutonnieres. She opened her arms. “I want you to meet Teresa,” he said. “But we have to wait till after. Tradition, you know.”
Eleanor made her way over to the porch. Through the screen door, she saw Ursula, pinning a sprig of bachelor buttons on her brother’s lapel. Her older brother. Al. Also Elijah, and two young men who must be brothers of the bride.
Eleanor stood outside the door to the porch, which allowed her the small, simple pleasure of getting to see her children looking happy and relaxed, as at least one of them—Ursula—was unlikely to be when she encountered her mother. It might all change when she stepped in the door, so for a moment, Eleanor just stood there watching this young woman she’d given birth to, soon to give birth for the second time herself. Whatever else was true, one thing did not change. She would always love this child, and her children.
Then there she was—Louise, racing past Eleanor and bursting in the porch door to join them all. Her granddaughter didn’t know her, of course. To Louise, Eleanor was just another wedding guest.
Now she leapt into Toby’s lap and ruffled his hair. “My Toby,” Louise cried out. “I was looking for you everywhere. Let’s go see the goats.”
Toby had always loved babies and young children. (The old Toby, and even more so, this one.) “We can go after, okay, Lu?” he told her.
Through the screen, Toby spotted his mother before the rest of them did. For this one child of hers, no conflicted emotions existed. Just joy. (Here was his mother. This was good news. Simple as that.) His face broke into a smile, as it always did when he saw her. “Mama,” he said. The rest of them looked up.
Count the Ways Page 41
