The Rural Diaries

by Hilarie Burton

  If people weren’t giving me dead-baby gifts, they wanted to tell me dead-baby stories. There’s nothing more frustrating than someone saying, “Well, welcome to the club. I’ve had twelve miscarriages.” It seemed as if there was an unspoken competition between the members of this fucked-up sorority. I quickly realized that it is a much bigger club than I knew and that everyone had stories and advice. And as much as I appreciated it, I needed to find my own way.

  Tara gave me a book called Vessels: A Love Story, by Daniel Raeburn, about his and his wife’s experience of a number of miscarriages. His book helped because I couldn’t wrap my head around Jeff’s side of the story, and he certainly wasn’t telling it to me. All I could see was his hiding. He was out in the garage until dinnertime every day. He would come in, eat, help Gus shower, and then disappear for the rest of the night.

  I often read social media posts from couples announcing, “Hey, we miscarried but it brought us closer together.” I think it’s fair to say that miscarriage did not bring Jeffrey and me closer together. We were living in the same space but leading parallel lives. To be honest, most of the time we weren’t even living in the same space.

  That spring The Good Wife was canceled. We had banked on that being a job Jeff would do for a couple of years, one that would keep him in New York City. Then he landed Negan on The Walking Dead, and suddenly he would be all the way down in Georgia for the next three to five years.

  We were never going to have another child. It had been so hard to get pregnant. I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to coordinate dates when Jeff would be around and I’d be ovulating. It felt like every conversation we had was about having a baby.

  He’d ask, “What do you want for dinner?”

  I’d say, “A baby.”

  “Hey, what do you want to do this weekend?”

  I’d say, “Have a baby.”

  We tried to fill the house with life. Right before Gus’s birthday in March, I came home and found a huge metal tub in our living room. “Surprise!” Jeff said.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked. Peering down into the tub I spied two fluffy little creatures. One was clearly a duckling. The other?

  “That little duck is sick,” Jeff explained. “Ed was just gonna get rid of him, so I said I’d take him.” Taking a closer look, the second strange-looking creature was indeed a duck, but its poor neck was bent at an unnatural angle such that its head seemed too heavy for its body. With its head constantly upside down, walking was out of the question. On top of that oddity, poor baby duck also had an outrageous tuft of thick black downy feathers on its head.

  “What are we supposed to do with it?” It was just like Jeff to bring animals home without a solid game plan. “Is it gonna die?”

  “I don’t know! I just wanted its last days to be pleasant.”

  “Well what about the other one?”

  “I wanted him to have a friend.” It was sweet. And also smelly and messy and a big pain in my ass. But I couldn’t argue with where his heart was. That poor deformed baby could barely eat or drink. He just sat huddled up with his buddy, drawing comfort.

  I hit Google hard. Upside-down duckling head. Weak-neck duckling. Broken-looking-neck duckling. After a bit of exploring, I hit pay dirt. “Babe,” I yelled from the living room. Jeff popped his head in from outside.

  “What?”

  “It’s just a vitamin E deficiency! We can put it in its water.”

  “Are you serious?” And with that, he was off to the drugstore.

  Within a week, our sweet broken duck had a name—Norman, after his crazy hair that reminded Gus of the movie ParaNorman—and a tall straight neck. He could move around and eat and drink. It was a huge win for us. Life was precious. We had saved this little guy.

  Jeff left for Georgia, and the ducks grew bigger and no longer fit in the container he’d brought them home in. So my beautiful new claw-foot tub became their home. Gus would invite friends over to see them swim in the tub and feed them treats. Every single day I’d have to clean out their shavings and endless duck poop. It was hard not to see it as a metaphor: make something beautiful for the baby you thought you were gonna have and then watch it get shit all over. But, for what it was worth, I loved the ducks. Gus and I held them and stroked their glossy feathers.

  Alice gave birth in April, a couple of days before Jeff’s birthday. Ed had told us that she would wander off on her own when she was ready. So one sunny Saturday when we didn’t see her out in the back pasture, we raced with Gus along the fence line until we found her. She rocked her body against the fence, scratching her butt and bearing down. We stood a distance off, not wanting to interfere with her process. And then very quickly, without a sound, a huge sac dropped from her and Gus’s eyes went wide.

  “What’s THAT?!?”

  “That’s the baby, dude.” Alice went to work, licking at the embryonic sac until her soggy, red-haired baby emerged. We stayed there, the three of us, for a long time. We stayed while Alice groomed her baby. We stayed as the baby slowly climbed up onto its rickety new legs. We stayed until we got a good look and declared, “It’s a boy!”

  “What are we naming him, Gus?”

  There was no hesitation: “Alexander!”

  It was springtime on Mischief Farm. Babies were everywhere. Baby chicks at the feed store. Baby dairy cows in the field. Baby bunnies and foxes in our woods. But the things I used to delight in now served as a reminder of how broken I felt. Jeff was home, but I was avoiding him. We didn’t know how to talk to each other. The things I needed to hear, he didn’t know how to say; and the things he needed me to be, I couldn’t be. We moved around the same spaces, but not together. He wouldn’t enter a room until I left it. I wouldn’t tell him where I was going; I’d just leave and hide out in the garden or in town. I was just a vessel, and I was empty. Any energy I did have was going to Gus; I had nothing left for Jeff.

  I took a job filming a movie for a few weeks out of town. I needed that. With Gus at my side, we drove north across the Canadian border to Montreal, where we didn’t think about the farm or babies. We practiced our French and went to museums and shows and relished being pedestrians. For three whole weeks, we were city people. Jeff was down in Georgia working. We couldn’t have been farther apart.

  Coming home in May, I hit the ground running. I couldn’t feel anything if I kept busy, so I became the most task-oriented person in town. The garden I planted at Samuel’s was overflowing with blooms. Gus’s class snacks were lavish Pinterest-worthy creations. My garden was incredibly tidy. All the little sprouts of weeds were targets for my suppressed emotions. Kill kill kill.

  I worried Jeffrey. I knew that I was a shell of myself. I knew that he could see it. So I avoided him.

  He found me down in the garden one day. I had collected a heap of rocks that were left over from a landscaping project. Pulling them out, one by one from the back of the Rhino, I was laying a path through our large vegetable garden that would allow me easier access to our snap peas, beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers at the back of the garden. I’d pinched my hand between two large stones and blood caked my knuckles.

  “Talk to me,” he said, hands shoved down deep in his pockets.

  “What are you talking about? I’m fine.” I was angry. I’d wanted to talk months before. I’d wanted him to hold me in bed while I cried. I’d wanted him to not have been so difficult about getting pregnant in the first place. I’d wanted him to not disappear to go chop wood and then get resentful that I was doing the exact same thing. What’s good for the goose, right? I’d wanted him to know I was angry and then apologize. And these mantras of anger had been running in my head for months. But then—

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Jeffrey had finally seen me. We talked about our grief. We talked about how we both felt like failures. We talked about how lonely we were. Suddenly, standing there with his hands in his pockets, Jeffrey was a different person. He was incredibly vulnerable. He talked to me about ho
w much he valued me and that this was home and that it was worth any fight.

  And as we talked, he started helping me. He stood and went to get a whole bunch of rocks, laying pathways through the garden for me. Each path was a manifestation of what he was saying. We worked on this garden together.

  Uncertainty still rattled around in my brain. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t know how long this transformation would last. I worried that Jeff was home for only two days at a time. I wondered whether this peace was going to continue past this visit. Would he grow frustrated with me for being depressed? (I can say now I was absolutely depressed; I simply didn’t realize it at the time.) But, in the end, I knew this family and this farm and this life together were worth the fight.

  We began working in tandem. It was warm enough that the ducks were ready to be moved outside. But they needed a proper house to keep them safe at night. So Jeff used scraps of lumber and some old galvanized metal to build them the ultimate duck hut. We set it up together by the chicken houses.

  When I was a kid, Dad told me a story about how my grandmother Dorothy had a pet duck that followed her around everywhere in the house. I never understood the appeal of having a duck as a pet until we moved to Mischief Farm. Ducks are weird. They’re so expressive. They chase and kill mice; they terrify the dogs; they go down with the Highland cattle and get in the cows’ feed; they have zero fear.

  I wanted to be a duck.

  * * *

  One morning that spring I was planting flowers around the trees in front of the shop when I struck up a conversation with a regular customer named David. He sat on the bench while I dug around the roots of the trees to fit in mums and lantana. “You gotta come by Astor sometime,” he said.

  “What’s Astor?”

  “That big brick building around the corner. The one with the gates.”

  I had always slowed down as I drove past the big Renaissance-style Astor Home for Children building. At Halloween, dozens of lit-up jack-o-lanterns lined its stone wall. But no one ever talked about what went on there.

  “What’s the story?” I asked.

  “I work with the kids there,” David explained. “I just see all the stuff you’ve done here at Samuel’s. The dorms there are bad. Like, really bad. You should do over there what you’ve done here.”

  Coincidentally, a couple of weeks later, Tara came to me and asked whether she and some other women could use Samuel’s as a meeting space as they discussed Astor.

  “Totally cool,” I said. “In fact, a guy who volunteers over there has been telling me about it. Can I introduce you guys?”

  There had been rumors about the Astor building, built in 1914 by Vincent Astor to house the Astor Home for Children. False rumors, mind you. We’d lived in town for five years and never realized that the “scary place for the criminally insane” we’d heard about was that brick behemoth around the corner. Legend had it that once it had been taken over by Catholic Charities in the 1940s, it had been run by nuns who tried to separate the kids who lived there from the rest of town, and everyone in town still spoke of it in hushed tones.

  I was just supposed to provide introductions, but Tara showed up with Kate Kortbus, a powerhouse New Yorker who makes things happen, and her best friend, Lawrie Firestone, who is literally walking sunshine. It didn’t take much persuading to get me to sit down with the group.

  I learned a lot. Astor Services for Children and Families isn’t an institution; it’s a salve. The people there treat and care for the victims of the very worst child abuse in the state. It’s a residential treatment center, and usually about sixty kids are living there at any given time. The amazing staff provide quality education and mental health services for children with behavioral and emotional health problems and for children at risk of placement in foster care, and they offer help to families that need assistance in developing the skills necessary to raise their children in challenging environments.

  Lawrie told me how badly the group needed money, especially to renovate the dorms. As they talked about these kids, and about specific horror stories they had lived through, I began to take it very personally. I wanted another child desperately. I had all this aching room left in my heart for a child. How could other people hurt their kids?

  Telling Stories

  The Burtons are liars. My father chief among us. When we were little, he told us he met my mother saving her from a dragon and that he kept the dragon’s head locked away in the mysterious black trunk out in the shed. My mother would solemnly nod and casually throw in key details—the angry giant, the white horse, her gown. In reality, Dad met Mom when she was nineteen and a checkout girl at the Giant supermarket. He was thirty-two and sure of himself, and it wasn’t a white horse, but a white Monte Carlo with a flashy burgundy interior. So, perhaps the story was true after all.

  Once, Johnny Zarling, our neighbor and our pastor’s youngest son, asked why Dad had lost his hair. Wild Bill took the opportunity to beef up his legendary status, telling us it had been ripped out while he and his Green Beret buddies were rescuing a pack of kidnapped children from a monster called The Claw that lived on top of the water tower a couple blocks away. When we asked why a cop car was parked at Gramma’s house, he told us she was an undercover detective. I believed that one till I was sixteen and my parents overheard me telling a friend about my badass Gramma. They burst out laughing. Turns out, my aunt was just having a thing with a police officer.

  The trait is definitely hereditary. I’m a liar, too. For the first few months we were together, Jeffrey thought I was thirty years old. The night I met him, I figured I’d never see him again, so I rounded up from twenty-six. And then I promptly forgot about it, until we were celebrating my birthday. My best friend, Nick, hoisted his glass in the air and toasted, “Twenty-seven club!” Jeff demanded to see my driver’s license.

  Gus is my latest victim. He believes that there’s a door to the fairy kingdom on Mischief Farm. There is indeed a tree with a doorknob and a knocker. When he turns eighteen he’ll be able to tap in to his magical abilities and step through the portal. Or, he’ll just become a liar like the rest of us.

  Clearly, narrative, true or not, is of the utmost importance to us Burtons. We were never the best-looking or the wealthiest kids. We didn’t have the advantages we saw other kids enjoy. But we could weave a helluva story. And we could turn misfortune into a great tale, which has turned out to be a gift that has saved my life.

  * * *

  Tara suggested that we take a look at the building, so we walked up the street to the beautiful structure, with its gorgeous hand-carved details in the stone above the solid wooden doors that look like something you’d find on a castle. But inside we found a nightmare. We’re talking Oliver Twist–level bad. Nothing had been updated since the 1950s, and the kids’ dorms were cold and sterile, like prison cellblocks. We were greeted by Sonia Barnes-Moorhead, who was clearly in charge. She was warm and very up front about the facility’s need for help.

  Suddenly, when I needed it most, here was another sign from the universe. I’d been grieving for six months and ruining my life. My grief was making me someone I hated. It was ruining my relationship with Jeffrey. It was ruining my ability to be a good mother. So, right there, I pivoted.

  I said to myself, Okay, well I’m not having any more kids, but I still have all this energy to put into kids. I like them. I like good kids. I like naughty kids. I like being around them. I like their chaos.

  So all this energy for children that I had, I poured into Astor. The group met again at Samuel’s. “We’re going to throw a fundraising event this fall that will pay for the materials for a renovation,” I told them. “Some paint and some creature comforts will go a long way in fixing the place up. Let’s do a show.”

  “A show?” Tara asked. She was my theater junkie friend. “Like a play?”

  “No, more like a vaudeville bit. Short acts. Like storytelling.” My wheels were spinning. “What if we did an
evening of ghost stories? That was the best part of being a kid—sitting around trying to scare each other.”

  “I like that!” Kate-the-powerhouse said.

  “Think we can get everything ready by October?”

  “Honey,” Kate said, “we can do anything.”

  When it was time for Jeff to leave again to go to Georgia, he asked me to go with him. The building of the house addition had dragged on and on, and without the baby to fill the spare room, I just wanted it over and done with. I asked the contractors whether they’d be able to work faster if we weren’t in their way.

  “Absolutely,” they said.

  So we loaded up my truck, and the whole family made our way down to the heat of Georgia for the summer. Before I could cultivate any more flowerbeds or raise any more new animals, we needed to work on the core of the farm—the three of us. Ed found people to watch over the animals while we were gone. Gus and I enjoyed an easy summer of waiting for Dad to come home from work, working on the Ghost Stories event for the fall, cooking, going on rambles in the woods, playing in creeks, and diving into all-around laziness.

  Gus and I also popped over for a short trip to Wilmington, North Carolina, to visit my parents for my dad’s birthday. A couple of my brothers were around as well, and as we settled in one night, Gus started talking about boats and how cool they were. My brother Billy, who was in from LA, said, “Hold up dude. You’ll like this.”

  Next thing I know, Titanic was on. I hadn’t seen that movie since it came out in theaters, and it was the movie you went to see on dates. I had never been a big fan, but then I heard a voice that I loved. Bill Paxton, with his glorious 1990s earring and naughty grin, opened the movie, and Gus started yelling, “Mr. Bill! Mr. Bill! That’s Uncle Bill!”

  Gus was beaming. Transfixed. I texted Bill: