“I would never say such a thing.”
“I could have sworn you did.”
“Must’ve been babbling drunk.”
My father, who was a collector of rare books and manuscripts, seemed to have business dealings with certain people outside his esoteric world, associations that made no sense. Before she divorced him, my mother alluded to illegal money lending.
Anthony was staring at me, unsmiling. One of his eyelids was twitching, and when I studied him more closely, I saw that his eyes themselves were slightly bloodshot.
“Would you mind taking a walk with me up to the orchard to check it out again?” he asked. I hesitated. “Would it make you feel too uncomfortable?”
I considered the idea for a moment. “I guess not if I had your company.”
We went outside and began strolling down the driveway. The mid-May sun was out and New England was weakly warm, a breeze stirring the tall, lanky grasses, the blooming larkspur farther off in the meadows. Spring cranks itself out in fits and starts in Vermont, and the desolate brown arduously trades itself in for greening weeks after New York and Boston and even Portland, Maine. That day, on the surrounding hillsides, the trees were mostly budded, but the leaves were still that light electric green that set the darker, coniferous trees in relief. My lilacs were just barely blooming, the apple trees decked out in luxurious boas of white and pink flowers, beset by loops of honeybees, the air graced with the sweet smell of pollen. Depending upon my mood, the land either seems to breathe and expand or close in around me. The good thing about living in a rural place is that the cycles of nature, ever-changing, help give a broader perspective, particularly when you’re down in the dumps.
Just a few hours earlier, the road graders had come out for their springtime siege. The dirt on Cloudland Road was freshly raked; at least we didn’t have to hopscotch over potholes and ruts. The thoroughfare was now a smooth tabula rasa that allowed us to walk easily up a long hill to the orchard. Fields stretched out on either side, and we could hear the orchestral trilling of the bobolinks nesting right smack in the field grasses. Every year these birds seemed to arrive later and later from their migration to South America, and more were perishing in a massacre of metal blades when the threshers commenced the first haying of the meadows. I’d lobbied everyone on Cloudland—Paul and Wade and Anthony and even the biotech CEO from Boston—to delay their first haying by several weeks, to insure that these birds and their nests wouldn’t be churned under.
When Anthony and I finally reached the orchard, I saw that it was still cordoned off with yellow police tape. There, in the middle of everything, was the downed tree. Pointing it out to Anthony, I said, “How close was it to the one she was leaning against?”
“Five yards.”
Even though the orchard had morphed into a whole different landscape, ferns unfurling and dandelions sprouting, my mind was wandering back to the bleakness of January, of perished plant life and animals long dead in the cold. Looking around again, reminding myself that it was warm now and Angela Parker’s body gone, I told Anthony I thought it looked like a crime scene right out of Law & Order.
“Just what Emily says,” he agreed. “That this orchard looks condemned.”
Remembering how heaps of snow had been transported to the labs in a refrigerated compartment, I believed I could detect the indentation in the dampened ground exactly where Angela Parker had lain for seventy days against an apple tree. “Can you see where she was?” I asked Anthony. “That concave bit?” I pointed to it.
He squinted. “Not really.”
I broke from his side and went to the depression. Anthony followed, knelt down, and scanned the area with his hands. “I do see what you mean, but I think this just might be from all the officials and policemen and detectives taking samples—”
“She was a hundred and forty pounds,” I found myself saying. “Probably closer to one fifty with all her ski clothes.”
“They were soaked when she thawed.”
Neither of us spoke for a while and then Anthony said, “I went over the data from the autopsy.” He cleared his throat before continuing, “The coroner first concluded that she died in the parking lot. But when we spoke recently he told me he changed his mind.”
“How so?”
Anthony shielded his eyes with his hand and looked toward the dense sea of trees beginning at the edge of the orchard. “They found too much blood here on the site. She was still alive and bleeding and probably fell asleep due to the exposure.”
I quailed with a sudden chill and told him I wanted to go home. And so we walked back, each of us inwardly revisiting our conversation, spooked by the orchard’s eeriness. Just as we reached my long driveway and I noticed that one of the split rails that lined it had collapsed, Anthony said, “Something I’ve been meaning to discuss with you.”
I turned away from him, approached the dislodged rail, and began lifting it. He rushed over to help and together we jammed it back into its groove. When we finished I could see that he looked terribly perturbed.
“Emily is going to be leaving,” he said in a quavering voice.
Shaking my head, I said, “Oh?” and continued walking toward the house, trying to conjure up how to respond, realizing my somewhat muted reaction was probably an inkling that the news hardly came as a shock. But also I was remembering what Granny had once inferred about Anthony, that he might be capable of some sort of meanness or cruelty, so naturally I was wondering if Emily had found out about Fiona or if he’d paraded his affair in front of his wife. And I was also wondering if Emily had volunteered to leave because, as she’d casually mentioned to me several times over the past three years, she’d wanted to move closer to her family in North Carolina. Looking over at Anthony, I made myself say, “You mean you’re separating?” He nodded.
“What about the girls?”
“They’ll be going with her.”
No wonder he’d reacted as he had during our earlier discussion about child custody. I assumed that his affair with Fiona was the unfortunate trade-off.
“Is this a mutual decision, or is it more one-sided?”
“Mutual. You’ll probably find this hard to believe, but it’s been coming on for a long time.”
What did I know? The depths of other people’s relationships were always inaccessible. The news of any breakup always made me sad. It provoked thoughts of my husband and my inability to forgive him, the loss of Matthew and the fact that he’d had to go all the way to Thailand to feel sufficiently cut off from me.
As soon as Anthony left, with renewed vigor I went back to looking for the Wilkie Collins novel. I spent a frantic hour combing through my piles and my shelves and then suddenly remembered that Breck had asked to read it and I’d lent it to her.
I looked at my watch. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. I knew the best way to reach my twenty-two-year-old was sending a text, a method of communication that all my friends, including my college roommate, Theresa, used but which I reviled partly due to the fact that my cellular phone was more than five years old, equipped with a number pad rather than a keyboard. I grabbed the digital fossil out of my night table, turned it on, and seeing that it barely had a charge, plugged it in and sent my message: Didn’t I lend you a novel called The Widower’s Branch, a Wilkie Collins?
The message was returned almost instantaneously.
Yup. Hey from Short Hills Mall. Why?
I’d like you to overnight it to me.
Done. Now, can I call you?
The house phone rang a moment later. “How long have you had it?” I began.
“Like a year and a half.”
“But of all his novels, why did you want to read something unfinished?”
“For just that reason. I found that bit intriguing. It also looked interesting and kind of creepy. I thought it might be a fun, quick read.”
“With no resolution.”
“No, but an outline.”
“Well, I got nervous becaus
e I couldn’t remember what I did with it. What did you think of it?”
“I actually didn’t get a chance to read it. Vi snapped it up and read it and then I forgot about it. But I know exactly where it is. It’ll be no problem to get it to you. Here in New Jersey, the overnight shipping companies actually pick up from your house.”
“Certainly a great reason to live there!” I quipped.
“You can’t be sarcastic about it since you’ve never been to visit.”
“Yes I can. I know New Jersey. I grew up in New York City … hello! And I will visit.”
“Not holding my breath for that one. Anyway, I’ll package the book up as soon as I get home.”
Once we got off the phone I decided to be whimsically out of character and send her another text. Thank you, darling lamb.
NP, was her response.
She knew I hated it when she made words into acronyms.
* * *
I had Breck when I was twenty. During her childhood she would accuse me of naming her after the popular shampoo that disappeared from the market when she was around five years old. I actually intended to name her after Hemingway’s Brett Ashley; however, when the hospital misspelled her name on the birth certificate, her father and I decided we liked “Breck” better.
Our relationship became strained when Breck was thirteen and I discovered that her father was having a long-term love affair. Rather than agreeing to end it immediately, he asked for a “timetable” that would allow him a chance to wean himself away from the woman, as though she were a drug that would cause him acute withdrawal if he cut off his reliance too quickly. Outraged, I immediately filed for divorce. At the time I foolishly tried to explain the dynamics of the situation to Breck, who, Daddy’s girl that she was, futilely begged me to give her father the second chance he’d requested.
However, as soon as I began divorce proceedings, my husband promptly ended his affair and begged for a reconciliation. But how could I reconcile? I was afraid of forgiving him, afraid that if I gave in he’d just eventually find somebody else and hurt me again. Little did I know that this fear was going to tamper with the rest of my life. I became so opposed to caving in and accepting my husband again that I even managed to find a temporary distraction of my own, a man whose welcoming face and deep blue eyes decisively numbed me to my husband’s entreaties.
Six months to the day after signing the final divorce papers, my ex-husband was diagnosed with incurable throat cancer. He was by then unattached and living alone. Breck asked that I allow him to move back into our New York apartment—this was still two years before I moved full time to Vermont. I agreed, he came home again, and together Breck and I nursed him until he died. And in those last days of his life I came to deeply regret my decision not to forgive him. I even guiltily wondered if my refusal might have played some part in his fatal illness. Worse still, Breck has always blamed me for not having it within myself to reconcile with her father once he’d terminated his affair. And after he passed away, she confessed to me that even though we all managed to be together again during his last days, her sense of family had been irrevocably shattered.
And probably even more painful to her were a few men who in the coming years came to live with us temporarily—each of them no longer than six or eight months—but ultimately never enchanting me as much as my ex-husband. Breck naturally hated all these “pretenders,” comparing them unfavorably to her father and resenting me because I so easily allowed them to move in after having refused her father’s attempt to mend the marriage.
Then at the age of seventeen, and right after I began teaching at Saint Mike’s, Breck began to lose interest in eating. She got morbidly thin. I remember standing with her on my bowed, nineteenth-century bedroom floor, pointing at the full-length mirror, trying to show her how much bigger I was than she—my wrists, my arms, my trifling breasts (she was virtually flat-chested). And I’ve always been considered a slender, leggy woman. “How can you not see this?” I pleaded as we stood there.
“I can’t, Mom, I can’t. To me, I look huge.”
“But do I look huge?”
“No, Mom, you look just fine.”
“But you’re way thinner than I am.”
“No, Mom, we’re different body types.”
“We’re not. We have exactly the same build.”
“Not true. I’m built like Granny,” she insisted, which was understandable and yet delusional. “And anyway, you’re older. Pushing forty. Standards are different for you.”
I argued no further.
That summer Breck ate so little and grew so thin she stopped menstruating. Her face grew positively skeletal, as did her arms, her stomach stretched tight and concave, and her doctor strongly advised me to commit her to an inpatient eating-disorder clinic. But before I gave in, I nurtured a hope that if we made a trip up to Granny’s house (which by then I’d inherited) on Grand Manan and spent a few weeks by the sea, walking low tide, picking wild blueberries, buying fresh lobsters, and just being alone with the boom of the breakers, that Breck would get a perspective on what she was doing to her body, to her psyche, and start nourishing herself again. And so we drove eight hours up through central Maine with its lake regions, its wildly verdant and rocky mountains, and crossed into barren New Brunswick. Leaving our car on the mainland, we made our ferry crossing.
Perched on a cliff high above the Bay of Fundy, the houses have shingled sidings, many of them old and buckling and a tarnished natural sea gray color after withstanding decades of salt air. Breck always loved driving up there, and on every visit she hounded me for stories about indomitable “Granny,” the dowager empress of the island, and the summers I’d spent on Grand Manan.
Upon arrival during that time of her illness, Breck and I enacted our usual ritual: cleaning windows grimed with salty spray. We grabbed squeegees and old plastic buckets and filled them with water and vinegar and carved ourselves out a clear view of the cold ocean visible in a great molten welter from our cliffside promontory. It was fun, chattering work and Breck’s mood seemed to elevate. I’d already convinced her to read Anna Karenina, and the first night we were there she stayed up late laughing and crying over it. I lay in my bed in the room adjacent, worrying about her, deluding myself with the idea that literature is always a balm—Tolstoy, with your great baggy novel, you’ll help her get a handle on this self-destructive phase, won’t you? But soon I realized that grand narrative sweep had done little to break my daughter’s compulsion to starve herself, that the fresh lobsters we bought in the harbor repulsed her (she said their meat reminded her of dried red cottage cheese), that the wild blueberries we picked right off the bushes resembled blood clots, that rice tasted like pebbles. The only thing she could eat was egg whites cooked until they were crisped and which she laced with ketchup. However, some days she found it impossible to get anything down at all, even lozenges of milk chocolate, which as a last resort I tried to press on her just to provide some calories.
Shortly after we returned to Vermont, Breck allowed me to place her in a psychiatric facility down in Brattleboro. The medical staff forbade me to see her for two weeks, making me feel that I was the cause of her illness. Wasted from her self-inflicted starvation, her organs were functioning weakly. She had to be put on intravenous sustenance and the hospital feared that her heart might give out. When they told me this bit of news, I remember looking through the antique rolled-glass windows of my study at my red barn with its sagging, rusted metal roof, to my exuberant garden of tiger lilies, Cherokee sunsets, and golden jubilee. The heads of the flowers bowed over, looking dried and sapped of life as though a fierce spell of winter had suddenly invaded July. I knew Breck’s life was in peril and, having already lost my husband, I didn’t know how I would go on if my daughter died.
I lived from day to day in a stupor of anxiety, hardly eating anything myself, waiting for bulletins that were never very promising. “She’s the same today. Not eating. She sleeps mostly, even without medicatio
n. She’s too weak to walk very far. She’s dizzy.” What they didn’t tell me, couldn’t tell me, wouldn’t dare to tell me was “She wants to kill herself.”
And it was just when things were looking particularly dire that Breck responded to the idea of having some white toast with butter and maple syrup spread on it. It was the first good-news phone call, and the flood of relief allowed me to sleep for several hours, the first substantial bout of sleep I’d had in days. The small meals increased over the next ten days and slowly Breck found her way back into the rhythm of regular eating. After a few more weeks of gradually expanding food intake and intensive therapy, she was released from the hospital.
But the problem persisted, particularly whenever she felt depressed or overly anxious. She left for college that autumn, ironically in Maine, and while most women report gaining weight during the first semester, Breck returned home five pounds lighter. The doctors had already explained to me: now she’d come so close to dying she’d be more susceptible to bouts of anorexia—I suppose the way fingers and toes, once frostbitten, are forever prone to it.
* * *
The day after Breck and I conducted our exchange of text messages, I returned home late in the afternoon to find that UPS had left leaning against my back door a small package with her return address in Morristown. I tore off the wrapping to find a book whose antique vellum dust jacket was inscribed with an etching of a huge willow tree overhanging a river, with the words The Widower’s Branch superimposed over the image, and below it Wilkie Collins’ final work. I was relieved to have my rare book in my hands again. On a yellow Post-it in her characteristic up-and-down flourish, Breck had written, Ma, sorry I sat on this one for so long. Love B.
I thought of Gogol dying in the midst of writing Dead Souls, a great work in comparison to this very slim volume, whose text, not even one hundred pages, opens with a description of the River Nene in the East British Midlands, a place that I remember visiting once with Theresa and a bunch of loopy American tourists. Somehow, in the last bit of prose he ever wrote, Collins is able to rise to a fairly considerable height of descriptive powers: bogs and camphor trees draped in misty eeriness and situated on a river (whose current is even more powerful than the Connecticut) that requires a boat full of oarsmen to navigate upstream.
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