That Summer in Maine

by Brianna Wolfson

  Hazel was beginning her own journey and she needed the space to do it. So Jane settled for a text message instead.

  She typed, Thinking of you, hit Send and then held the phone against her chest. She would be lying to herself if she said she wasn’t wishing that Hazel would call her immediately and want to come home. But the phone remained cold and dormant.

  Jane continued down the hallway into her bedroom, where Cam was already in bed, reading by lamplight. She tucked herself in under the covers next to her husband.

  “The twins went down easy tonight, huh?” Cam said and then kissed her on the cheek. His lips lingered there for longer than usual.

  Jane nodded and smiled. These were the kinds of moments she could look forward to without Hazel around.

  “Which means I’ll go down easy tonight, too!” Cam laid his book on the bedside table, turned the lamp off and pressed his ear into the pillow with his face turned away from Jane’s. “Good night, love,” he whispered and then didn’t make another move or sound.

  And neither did Jane, but her mind was swirling with thoughts of Hazel. Whether the girls had arrived safely. What Hazel was doing. How she was feeling. Whether she liked Silas. Whether she liked Eve. Whether she was homesick. What they ate for dinner. If they had dessert. What they would do tomorrow. It all swirled and swirled into a tornado picking up momentum and fear and anxiety.

  Jane checked her phone for a response. Still nothing. She scrunched her eyes shut.

  Her heart was pulsing. Sleep was not likely. Not likely at all.

  Jane opened her eyes up wide, and as quietly as possible slipped out of the covers, out of the room and resumed reading Susie’s notebook from right outside Hazel’s door.

  Letter 2

  Learning I was pregnant

  Susie

  Dear Eve,

  Shortly after my trip up to Grandor, a pregnancy test I took alone in our bathroom revealed a second blue line. I clutched my belly. I pressed my open palm into my flesh tenderly. I remember that it surprised me that I was happy with how supple and bloated it was. I usually wanted my belly taut.

  There were many other mixed feelings, too. I had wanted a baby so, so badly. I wanted you. But I was so, so ashamed to have betrayed my husband. It was very out of character. I felt a flash of wondering how I would ever live with myself. And then I thought of you, and it melted away.

  It was pure elation, despite the memory of being in bed with a man that was not my husband. That was not your father. As I told you in my last letter, I was trying desperately to forget everything back home. It’s no excuse, but Silas was the perfect man to violate the sanctity of everything I thought I once believed in. He was scruffy and dark and strong and his hands were calloused. He was a man so clear, so in control, of his own morality and attitude. It was as if there was an invisible boundary around him. One that I could not cross. Which was exactly what I wanted because I knew I was going back to my life at home with your father.

  But still, this was something I had not yet encountered in another man. Something that intrigued me.

  Especially after months of calendars and trackers and hollow lovemaking and waiting with your father for that second line on the pregnancy test to emerge. Of course, it never did. We learned soon after that that your father’s sperm wasn’t viable and that he would never be able to produce children. Imagine that, honey. It was heartbreaking. Everything felt so empty. My belly. My life. So I had run away to Grandor and done something so terrible. So unfair to your father. Something I want to say I would take back, but I never can because it led me to you.

  And truth be told, when I woke up the next morning after having been with Silas, he was gone. I vaguely remember him tiptoeing out and telling me he had to get home, but I was still hazy with sleep and the remnants of the prior evening’s tequila. I was glad he wasn’t there, though, because alone in that bed after doing something so unspeakable, my feelings for your father and our life at home intensified. They surged through me so fiercely. My heart beat with it. My blood was vicious with it. I’d believed I got everything I wanted from Silas. I committed to letting that memory live in a place so far away in my mind that no one would know about it. I vowed not to tell Parker. Not to tell my girlfriends. Anyone.

  I clutched the pregnancy test in my hands. I had been wrong about what Silas would give me. I honestly felt relief more than anything. I had ached for this moment, this baby. I had yearned for it. And now here it was. Small and thirsty for life. A life that I could provide. If only it were your father’s.

  There was a time in my life that I wouldn’t have lied about something so big, but there were things that were bigger than a single lie. Your father, and this baby growing inside of me, and our whole future together. Our family.

  I closed my eyes and exhaled. I looked at myself in the mirror, straight into my own eyes, and then went to meet your father in the bedroom with the pregnancy test in hand.

  I told him it was a miracle and thrust the plastic stick in front of the book he was reading. I told him we were pregnant. I tried to keep my voice from quivering. I paused and then swallowed to clear the lump that had formed in my throat.

  Without hesitation, your father looked up from his book and flung his arms around me.

  He agreed that it was a miracle in a soft and earnest voice.

  He squeezed me even tighter and then pressed his lips into my neck.

  It was everything I envisioned this moment to be.

  With your father’s arms around me and his voice in my ear, I was quick to let the tension of the lie dissolve. I relaxed into your father’s arms and then hugged him back. I was surprised how simple it was for everything that happened with Silas to burrow its way even further from reality. For me to rewrite the story of my family. But I did.

  I could tell by the weight of your father’s body around me, the delicate way in which he kissed me, that he was so relieved, so ready, for this to be the truth, too.

  And so, to me and your father and to everyone else, it was our truth.

  After all these years of trying, we were having our baby. That was what we stuck to for so many years.

  I’m sorry if it made a mess of things,

  Mom.

  * * *

  And with that, Jane felt compelled to write her story.

  Letter 2

  Learning I was pregnant

  Jane

  Dear Hazel,

  When the pregnancy test revealed that there was a baby inside of me, I had a moment of clarity in my life. A moment of honesty with myself. I wanted more from Silas. And with this baby, I would want even more and more and more. My wants would be exponential. After learning about you, I would keep finding my hands cradled around the bottom of my still-flat belly. I had been waiting for days to tell Silas what was inside, but I felt guilty. Guilty of wanting real, engulfing romance. Guilty of wanting to expand our love into more. Into parenthood. I thought of Torrey and Ruby. What they meant to Silas. I knew in my heart that I, that we—you and I—could never fill Silas up like they had.

  I woke up one night just as Silas was making his way into our bedroom. It was four o’clock in the morning, much later than normal, and he curled his body around me. He reeked of beer and whiskey and cigarettes and someone else’s perfume. I now know that someone else was Eve’s mother.

  He told me that he didn’t think we should do this anymore. He told me he was in pieces and couldn’t be put back together. He told me he wasn’t a good man and then his words trailed off into mumbles and he fell asleep.

  I reached down and held my belly. Despite the heat, I felt a chill up my spine. I realized that we had exposed each other’s deepest vulnerabilities. Me wanting to be a mother. Him wanting to be alone. I knew that we had arrived at the painful but relieving place where all relationships end.

  I rolled over in bed and faced Silas
. He was lying on his back with his mouth open, snoring from the back of his throat. A lock of hair was plastered to his forehead, sticky from sweat and heat and probably sex.

  It, of course, bothered me that he had been with another woman, but what really stung was the unequivocal knowledge that I would be raising you myself. I felt you inside me even though I had read that you were only the size of a lentil then.

  I lurched over Silas and put my mouth close to his ear.

  I told him I was leaving. It was the only thing I could do.

  Without opening his eyes, Silas rolled onto his side and wrapped his tanned muscular arm around my hips and squeezed the flesh of my butt between his fingers.

  It was hard to do it, but I peeled his fingers from my body.

  And then I said that it was for good. I’m not sure he understood in his drunken, sleepy haze, but it didn’t matter much. I was leaving for me.

  He opened one green eye. The other one was pressed into the pillow.

  I held his gaze for only a moment, but time stretched and stretched and stretched. There was an impermeable silence between us. I had thought we would be drenched with sadness or regret. Instead we seemed to be blooming with understanding and respect. With the acknowledgment of balance and rightness and possibility and relief.

  I felt a tear emerge on the precipice of my bottom eyelid. I didn’t want to cry, so I pressed my finger against it to prevent it from falling. I looked down at my finger and was happy to see that it was not as wet as I expected it to be. And then, I got up from the bed and walked out of the room without further ceremony or explanation.

  If falling for Silas was the start of your life, this moment was the start of our life. From that moment on, it was you and me, baby.

  I’m sorry if it made a mess of things,

  Mom.

  16

  Jane was walking down the hallway one afternoon while the boys were napping just a few days after Hazel left, when she spotted Hazel’s school backpack slouched in the corner of her bedroom through the crack in the doorway. It felt like a violation to go into Hazel’s room when she wasn’t there, but Jane couldn’t help it. She ached for any connection to her daughter. Jane slipped furtively into the bedroom and pulled the backpack up from the floor. She held it up in front of her face as the zippers jingled at the sides. It smelled of pencil lead and spearmint gum and a sweet candy-like perfume. Precious smells of a teenage girl.

  She pulled the backpack into her chest and hugged it as if it were Hazel. She pulled the straps over her shoulders and let the weight of contents of the bag tug down on her shoulders. As she embraced the backpack in her arms the notebooks and binders moved under the canvas like bones under skin. She thought of Hazel with that backpack on her own shoulders, spraying herself with that perfume, chewing that spearmint gum, scribbling notes in class. The rest of the room looked like it could belong to any girl, really. Clothes were piled in little stacks in corners, and on the carpet, and on the desk, and on the chair. Notebooks and textbooks and papers and pens and highlighters were strewn across the desk. A pile of different-flavored ChapSticks lay crisscross like pick-up sticks. There were a few posters on the wall featuring movies with actors Jane didn’t recognize.

  But then, there was the sign of the daughter she knew. On the bedside table, there was a picture of herself and Hazel at the park holding eaten watermelon slices in front of their mouths to form big green watermelon rind smiles. Hazel’s two front teeth were missing but the rest were shining out from behind as she smiled. Jane remembered when this was taken, a few weeks before Hazel’s seventh birthday. Hazel was wearing a white T-shirt with a big pink dinosaur on the front and Jane was wearing a blue tie-dyed T-shirt with vibrant, swirling circles. Her hair looked careless but free in a loose braid that slung in front of her shoulder. There was so much light in both their eyes. So much youth in their cheeks. And next to that photo was a picture of Hazel at fourteen years old, holding the twins right after they were born. Griffin and Trevor were each wrapped in a little blue blanket, barely discernible. Hazel was looking up at the camera from her seat and her mouth was closed and her lips curled up to form a calmer smile. Her hair was messy in front of her face, and her shirt was drooping off one shoulder. Hazel looked simultaneously so old and so young holding the boys like that. It was the first day of Hazel’s new life.

  It occurred to Jane that she might not know her daughter as well she thought she did. That perhaps Hazel was off in Grandor, Maine, truly starting her new life. Perhaps Eve and Silas were enough to fill her up. Enough to fill up all that space she knew she’d left empty here at home. Letting Hazel embark on this journey forced Jane to question if she was there enough as her daughter started to grow and change into a young woman. But still, this silent treatment from her very own daughter, her very own flesh and blood, felt like punishment.

  Sure, Jane had been distracted by the twins and Cam. But how couldn’t she have been? Sure, she should have noticed that Hazel was withdrawing and probably didn’t do enough to intervene, but that could have been simple teenage stuff. It didn’t have to mean that Hazel would leave her forever. And Jane was starting to feel increasingly anxious that that was the path they were going down.

  When she decided to let Hazel go visit her real father, she assumed it would help quell some feelings of abandonment for Hazel. But when, when would that feeling of ease come? When would Hazel reach out? When would Hazel call? When would Hazel be back in her arms? How would she get her back? And what the hell was going on up there at the lake? Why had no one called her yet?

  Jane’s ears and cheeks started to get hot with a mix of sadness and anger. She dropped Hazel’s backpack on the floor as if it were radioactive and sought comfort in immersing herself in another one of Susie’s letters. She found the journal and cozied into a spot on the couch and started reading.

  Letter 5

  Telling (or not telling) Silas about you

  Susie

  Dear Eve,

  It wasn’t until you were well into elementary school that I felt compelled to tell Silas you existed. It started off as a gentle idea and turned into a raging, pestering, daily need. There was a steady drumbeat of it. I don’t know why I felt that compulsion but I did. Perhaps it was seeing you grow up into your own person, finding your independence in even the smallest of ways. And perhaps it was just because the wind started blowing a new direction. But whatever it was, I finally decided I would just head on up to Grandor, Maine, where I first met Silas and do it. I needed an excuse to tell your father so that I could make it up there for the day. It wasn’t challenging.

  Your father was sitting peacefully with a book in his hand and his reading glasses perched effortlessly on the bridge of his nose. He was looking calm and natural and easy as ever. One leg was crossed over the other and he was still in his work clothes. I had never known another man that felt more comfortable in slacks and a button-down. I had never even seen him untuck his shirt when he came home for the day. Your father licked the top of his finger and then turned a page without breaking his attention.

  I drew my palms firmly across my shirt and skirt, pressed my lips together and cleared my throat to get your father’s attention. I stood as erect as I could in the corner of our living room, waiting for a response. Your father was engrossed in the book.

  I cleared my throat again. This time a bit louder. I took a few steps toward him and my heels clicked against the floor.

  I told him I was thinking about getting my business up and running again and he replied that he thought it would be a good idea. He said it without even looking up from his book.

  I took a few more steps toward your father and crouched down in front of him and asked him if he was certain. He rested his book down on his lap and pulled his glasses off from his face.

  He assured me that he was. Your father smiled with just his lips, returned his glasses to their position o
n his nose and brought his book back in front of his eyes.

  It was so easy. He was so easy. About everything.

  I pressed down on the top of the book with my palm and looked back at your father. I told him how much I loved him and kissed him on the forehead.

  Later that weekend, I was off to Grandor again. When I arrived, the first thing that drew my attention was the great white tent filled with jars of honey sticks. I immediately flashed to that moment all those years ago in Grandor, when I’d allowed myself the indulgence of that one honey stick. I had all but given up sugar then in service of my figure. It was so unlike me to allow myself that kind of extravagance. To be so permissive of my petty desires. It was that single drip of sweet honey on my tongue that had spiraled into the meeting of eyes and tequila and then the brushing of hands and then more tequila and then the touching of lips and then more tequila and then spending the night with a man that made you, you.

  I suddenly felt like I was making a mistake going up there. My jaw and neck and shoulders and ribs tensed up. I wanted to undo the memory of that evening so badly. I wanted to replace that tequila-drenched night in a musty room with a man I hardly knew with a sober, respectful evening with your father on our Duxiana bed with fifteen-hundred-thread-count sheets.

  I felt another pang of not wanting to be up there.

  I walked over to the tent with the honey sticks and again pulled a dark brown root beer–flavored one from the jar. I twirled it in between my fingers and thought of Silas and thought of you and your father. I truly wished that you were your father’s daughter, biologically speaking, but I couldn’t completely wish away that night because that night created you. My healthy, beautiful, sweet little girl.

  I looked down at the honey stick between my fingers. The sweet little indulgence that started it all. I opened the change wallet from my beige leather purse, pulled out a small handful of coins and walked confidently over to the elderly woman in a wide-brimmed straw hat sitting behind the table. I asked how many honey sticks I could get for my change and placed the coins onto the table.