Then, in 2002, I was set up on a blind date with a man named Nick Keane. By this time, I had been on many blind dates, so I knew not to expect too much. Nick had thoughtfully selected a location convenient for me, a bar directly across the street from where I worked. Should this stranger turn out to be married, alcoholic, self-absorbed, or all of the above, I could easily claim a work obligation and slip back to the office.
But Nick was none of those things. He was forty-one to my thirty-six, intelligent, and attractive, and we fell into an easy banter, exchanging family histories and career paths. Nick had grown up in Kingston, New York, a two-hour drive up the Hudson. He was raised Catholic, adored his parents, and got along well with his five siblings. We had shockingly little in common.
“I guess you might call my childhood boring,” he said.
Nick might as well have grown up off the grid in Montana, his stable life was that foreign to me. He told stories of family vacations where eight kids—the Keane children were allowed to bring friends—were shoehorned into a station wagon for twenty-plus-hour drives to Florida, recounting this as if it were a good thing. I couldn’t think of a single question to ask about Nick’s wholesome childhood. Clearly, the two of us were not meant to be. Nick worked in finance and was wearing a suit and tie. I could already see how this night would unfold: a couple of drinks, some light conversation, a peck on the cheek, and see you never. I could hardly wait to call Kyra; she would appreciate this story.
That said, there was nothing objectionable about Nick either. I was enjoying our conversation and was in no particular rush to leave. Plus, the more I thought about it, the less I bought his story. Who had a totally happy childhood? A challenge formed in my mind. I would give myself an hour to crack my date and unearth his dark secrets. I smiled at Nick, studying him. He had a kind face, black hair, silver-gray sideburns, a ready smile, and dewy brown eyes that twinkled when he laughed.
Sensing my cynicism, he said, “I did manage to have a colossally unhappy marriage, if that helps.” But even his horrible marriage had had an upside: two wonderful boys, nine and twelve. Little did Nick know, however, that the existence of these boys put another nail in his coffin—and not for the reasons one might think. As a child, I’d met many of the women my father dated, all fabulous. But invariably I became more attached to them than my father, and when these women disappeared, I was heartbroken. I wasn’t going to do that to someone else’s children.
When my self-allotted investigative hour was up, I had nothing. I’d dug around and come up empty—no treasure, no corpses. The whole date felt oddly pleasant. Nick was warm and lovely, and, I could tell, already smitten with me.
Too bad I’d never see him again.
“I was married too, Nick,” I said as the evening was nearing its end. The waitress had just delivered our check; Nick took it from the table and slid three bills into the folder.
“No kids?” he asked.
“No kids,” I answered, smiling. “Actually, it’s a funny story. Instead of sharing children, my ex-husband and I share parents.” I let this sink in. “Nine years ago, my mother married his father.”
I’m not proud to admit that this was a line I trotted out from time to time for effect, to either encourage a conversation or end it. In Nick’s case, it was to let him know that I didn’t fit into his story. I needed to alert this nice man that our date was officially over. I would never meet his sons or his perfect family; the gulf between us was simply too vast to contemplate crossing.
It always took a beat for someone to connect these dots, and Nick was no exception. I watched his eyebrows furrow as he considered the information and then lift as he drew the startling conclusion: my ex-husband was my stepbrother.
Historically, my listeners had responded to this with one of two reactions: a pithy quip or a hasty retreat. Nick did neither. Instead, he seemed to absorb the complexity of my one-liner.
“I’ll call you,” Nick said, kissing my cheek as we parted.
When Nick did call a day or two later, I was at LaGuardia Airport waiting for a flight to California. I was headed to tell Francis Coppola in person that I planned to part ways with the magazine we’d created. We’d had a great seven-year run, but Francis wanted to move the operation to San Francisco and I had made a life for myself in New York City.
Coincidentally, I’d just hung up from a short conversation with another man I was dating, one whose family history was more familiar to me—divorced parents, major mother issues. He and I had gone out only a few times, but already we were playing a familiar game of cat-and-mouse: If I seemed interested, he backed away; if I acted indifferent, he advanced. He was still in love with his ex-girlfriend, which of course I found intoxicating.
“Hi, Adrienne, it’s Nick Keane.”
Apparently, I hadn’t scared him off.
“Hello, Nick Keane,” I said, and before I knew it, we’d dived headlong into an earnest conversation. I found myself confiding in Nick about the magnitude of loss I felt in letting go of my literary magazine. We spoke for twenty minutes and then, unexpectedly, my throat clogged with emotion.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, embarrassed.
“Look, I realize we barely know each other, but would you mind calling me when you land in San Francisco, just to let me know you’ve arrived safely?”
The September 11 terrorist attack had occurred just months earlier.
“I will, I promise,” I said. “Thank you for asking,” I added. “That’s very kind.”
For the six-hour plane ride, I sat in a window seat, stared out the oval porthole at the vast dome of sky, and contemplated the two phone calls and the men behind them, one ambivalent, one enthusiastic. There was something about the convergence of these calls, not five minutes apart, followed by this ample chunk of empty time that made me feel as if the universe were demanding my attention.
Margot’s words rang in my head: You only get one life, Rennie.
This was it, my one and only life. I was thirty-six years old. There were other ways to be. In that moment, I decided to make space for a different kind of future, one that allowed the possibility of Nick Keane.
Twenty-five
I hadn’t known that romance without drama was possible. I had only ever understood love to be fickle and fleeting. From my parents, I’d learned that when your vessel started to take on water, you found a lifeboat and abandoned ship. With Nick, I felt the intense psychic fusion of lust and love along with the steadfast assurance of deep attachment.
I married Nick in 2005, just over ten years after I left California. (Jack, who remained a friend through it all, attended the wedding with his new partner.) Nick and I were eager to start a family, and with the prospect of children on the horizon, I longed to return to my family home on Nauset Bay. Orleans was where I’d learned to swim, ride a bike, and catch striped bass. It’s where I’d had my first kiss and experienced my first heartbreak. The scent of low tide alone transported me to long summer days spent with my brother catching minnows in tidal pools. I wanted my children to experience it all, to have the same strong connection to the land.
Emboldened by this desire and finally having accumulated a small savings, I made the case to my mother that I should be allowed to share the guesthouse with my brother. In doing this, I failed to consider Peter’s feelings, having convinced myself that my brother’s substantial wealth would insulate him from injury. He could just rent another house for the balance of the summer, I thought. Hell, he could buy one. I reminded myself that Peter hadn’t cared when I’d been the one shut out. But despite my rationalizations, Peter was hurt, and my maneuverings reignited our lifelong competition. Our allegiance had always been to Malabar, not each other; we’d grown up like vines willing to strangle each other for sunshine.
* * *
I was thirty-nine when I started my family; I gave birth to a daughter and then, three years later, a son. I’d passed the previous decade imagining I’d gotten a handle on my relationship wit
h Malabar, but having children disabused me of that illusion.
Until Nick placed our newborn daughter into my arms, I hadn’t realized it was possible for the world to change so suddenly. I sniffed her head, and the intoxicating aroma seemed to fire new neural pathways, unleashing thoughts and emotions for which I had no frame of reference. Had Malabar experienced this when she’d held me for the first time? Or had she been too stunned that I’d arrived on Christopher’s birthday? I kept inhaling, attempting to imprint my daughter’s fragrant scent into my consciousness. Now that this baby was outside of my body, I didn’t know how I could possibly keep her safe. I felt love but also terror. Losing a child was not an abstract idea. It had happened to people I knew. It had happened to my parents.
When the doctor finished sewing up my abdomen, I was rolled out of the operating room and into the elevator, my newborn lying on my chest, Nick walking alongside. The elevator doors slid open with a chime, and Ben and Malabar were waiting on the other side. As my mother approached the gurney, a rush of emotion overtook me, and I was filled with the strange hope that my daughter had the power to heal us.
I was this child’s mother now, and at the sight of my own mother, I felt a rush of anxiety that caused me to weep.
“I love you, Rennie,” Malabar whispered to me. Then she turned her attention to the baby on top of me, extending the back of her index finger to caress my daughter’s cheek tenderly. “Hello, grandbaby.”
I felt sure that this new human, so clearly dependent on our collective love, had the power to bring out all that was good in us. It would be only a matter of time before Malabar and I, with the common goal of creating a better future for the next generation, would acknowledge our past. I imagined that my mother would soon come to me and explain herself. I had so much to say to Malabar in this moment, but when I opened my mouth to speak, my weeping turned into gulping sobs.
“Sweetie, are you okay?” my mother asked.
I tried to reassure her, but what I really wanted was for her to reassure me. I was not okay. I’d waited my whole life to be mothered by Malabar, and now, with this baby in my arms, it was too late for me.
I started breathing in spastic shallow bursts, turning red-faced. I was suffocating. I looked up at Nick, whose expression registered alarm. I couldn’t get enough air. Something heavy bore down on my chest and prevented me from taking a full breath.
In a swift maneuver, the nurse sent Malabar and Ben back to a bench in the hallway and turned the gurney toward my room.
“Breathe,” the nurse ordered sternly, gripping me by both shoulders and shaking me gently. “Listen to me, Adrienne. Calm down and take a slow, deep breath.”
Finally, I inhaled.
She wheeled me into my room.
“What just happened?” I asked once I’d regained my composure.
“You had a panic attack,” she replied.
At my blank look, she said, “You were hyperventilating. More air in than out.”
“But why?”
The nurse shrugged; she’d seen it all. “Probably it was anesthesia-related. A C-section is major abdominal surgery. Don’t worry. You’re okay now.”
My daughter’s eyes were open. I tucked the end of the hospital swaddling cloth back inside the wrap and sniffed her head again. Nick had a hand on my shoulder.
Maybe it was the anesthesia, but when I first saw my mother—as I lay there fresh and raw from having been carved open to bring her granddaughter into the world—the past ran me down. I had a vision like the kind people describe when they’re near death. For one brief second, it was as if a curtain had been lifted. I saw a long line of people, faceless in the distance, familiar as they got closer: my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents. I was at the front of this row of human dominoes, my infant in my arms, and as my forefathers and -mothers toppled behind me, they pushed the next generation into motion. There was no escape; their collective weight would crush me and my baby.
I had started out as an egg inside Malabar, just as she had begun as an egg inside Vivian, and so on, each of our fates charted from the depths of our mothers. What little I knew about my grandparents and great-grandparents had been constructed around a sturdy fact or two, embellished perhaps by a shy smile in a grainy photograph or an underlined sentence in a book or letter. The specifics of their lives would remain unknown to me, as mine would be to the baby I held. But our collective history would shape my daughter, and there was something noxious in our matrilineal line. Malabar was the only mother I had, but she was not the mother I wanted to be.
Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I’d been running for so very long and pass along this inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it. She would grow up to be beautiful and smart and agile, as I used to be, as her grandparents were, as her great-grandparents were before them.
Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.
Twenty-six
One moment, I held milk-drunk babies on my lap, caressing the silky tips of their ears as I watched the wind scallop the bay; the next, wobbly toddlers had turned into lanky children who sped past me, running full tilt across the sand, disturbing flocks of gulls and sandpipers feeding at the water’s edge. My children spent their summers on Cape Cod just as I’d dreamed they would, making driftwood forts and combing the beach for lucky stones and sea glass. They watched whales surface to spout, dull-eyed sharks slide beneath our boat, schools of bluefish chase frenzied minnows. They became best friends with Peter’s daughter, who was a year younger than my daughter and a year older than my son, and the three met each morning at a designated boulder on the bay beach between our houses that they called Cousins Rock. Nick and I marked their growth by carving grooves into a wood panel in our home; up, up, up they soared. Time leaped erratically: slow days, fast months, winged years.
My father-in-law, the beloved patriarch of Nick’s large and close-knit family, died in the summer of 2010. Nick and I had been together for eight years, married for five, and our children were five and two. Just before his funeral, his family found an old locked metal box hidden in the basement. The box looked ominous and I felt an irrational fear about what might be inside, afraid of the secrets Nick’s father might have kept. In my family, a locked box could only reveal an emotional bombshell—an illicit affair, illegitimate children, a shameful fetish. But the Keanes were excited by the prospect of the contents and went hunting for the key. Here it comes, I thought as Nick’s nephews pried it open. I braced myself and looked inside. But, no, there was no bomb. No terrible family secret. It was simply a cache of love letters that Nick’s mother had written to his father during their courtship.
Then, in February of 2013, Ben suffered a major stroke. The call came from Florida, where he and Malabar had been spending winters for years. I sat vigil with my mother for Ben’s final two days and witnessed his soul wrest itself free of his body in three heaving breaths, leaving a corpse in its place. Ben was gone. He was almost ninety-five and had been married to my mother for close to twenty years, their scandalous affair a distant memory.
Two months after Ben died, a year and a half after being diagnosed with ALS, Margot made the careful decision to end her life. Although she was long separated from my father, she remained one of my closest friends and I traveled to San Diego frequently to visit with her that last year. We spoke on the phone regularly and turned to text when she could no longer talk. What would I do without her? Her answer came in her final text message to me, written on the morning of her death: Where is Nora Ephron when we need her? I took this to mean “Embrace the mess, live fully, carry on.”
And then, most shockingly, Malabar’s sharp and agile mind started to slip from her grasp. Although she’d exhibited some minor confusion for a while—a missed hair appointment, an overcooked steak—I didn’t see
her disorientation for what it was. In hindsight, I can see that it wasn’t until her anchor, Ben, was gone that my mother started to drift.
In the spring following Ben’s death, I helped move Malabar from Florida back to Cape Cod, stopping first at their apartment in Cambridge, where we spent a few days doing the emotionally exhausting work of sorting through her husband’s belongings. We were having a glass of wine in the den one evening when, out of nowhere, my mother mentioned the family necklace.
“I suppose I should just give it to you,” she said. “I doubt I’ll wear it again.”
“Okay,” I said cautiously.
Malabar looked at me curiously, then exited the room and returned with the purple case. She opened it and placed it on the coffee table in front of us.
“Here you go,” she said unceremoniously.
When I realized that there was not going to be a grand gesture in this exchange—no box within a box within a box, no impassioned expression of love—I felt a moment of deprivation despite the great treasure I’d just been given.
“Tell me how Grandma fell in love with it,” I said, attempting to create a meaningful moment for myself. “I adore that story.”
“I think it was in Bombay where my mother first laid eyes on it.” Malabar paused, concentrating to remember. “She was at home and a peddler came by the house . . .”
“A peddler?” In all the years I’d heard this story, this was the first time the element of a merchant had been introduced.
My mother waved this off. She’d had several small strokes in recent years and spoke hesitatingly, often using words that were close to but not precisely what she meant. She continued the story until it reached its familiar end: my grandfather on bended knee proposing to Vivian for the second time. My mother, their only child, witness to their extraordinary and flawed love.
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