The One in My Heart

by Sherry Thomas

  Me too, he replied. I fixed her house because she told me she was going to live forever. I believed the old battle-ax.

  I smiled a little, touched his words, and set the phone aside. It promptly pinged again.

  She’d enjoy having you at her funeral.

  And I really want to go, I answered. But I’ve commitments here.

  I did have a number of commitments: several STEM presentations that Lara and I were participating in at middle schools around the city, a grad student’s mock defense that I’d agreed to attend, plus a conference in Montreal. But by far the most important appointment on my calendar was to take place after the conference.

  The Vermont farmer lived in the Northeast Kingdom. The farm had been and still was a dairy operation, but now there was also a B and B. I was booked for a one-night stay, to break my return journey from Montreal.

  I left Montreal late and didn’t reach the farm until after midnight. It was difficult to see anything in the dark. Even the B and B, which according to the website was a white-clapboard, picture-perfect restored farmhouse, was nothing but bulk and shadows.

  When I came out of the car, the cold night air was piercingly clear, and carried with it a whiff of manure. I inhaled deeply and could almost smell spring, the loamy scent that comes when soil wakes up after the long freeze of winter.

  The innkeeper had gone to bed. I let myself in with a key that had been left in a digital lockbox outside the front door. My room was on the top floor, snuggled beneath a slanting roof. The walls were a thick, creamy white, the floor light planks of ash. On the wrought-iron bed was a contemporary quilt that resembled a pixelated forest.

  I shook my head. The place was more chic than my own and bore little resemblance to my impression of the farm from more than twenty years ago. And I could see no trace of my mother. It had been a generation since she’d died—not to mention that she’d moved out of the farm even before that.

  Deep down, I always knew that the origin of my fear was not Zelda’s illness, but my mother’s abrupt disappearance from my life. I couldn’t remember her or those days when I must have cried for her after she was gone. But she was the reason I’d clung to Zelda from the very beginning, long before her first episode in Manhattan.

  I hadn’t wanted to lose another mother.

  And now I was here, at last, in the one place that was inextricably bound up with her. Her home, her refuge, the rustic backdrop against which I’d spun the first great escapist fantasy of my life.

  I took a picture of my room and sent it to Bennett. I thought abandonment issues usually don’t look so pretty up close.

  It must be the crack of dawn in England, but he replied only minutes later. No, they always look so pretty up close.

  The image that accompanied his text was a scanned photograph of a beautiful young man sitting on a set of wide, shallow steps—I recognized the back of Mrs. Asquith’s house. His shirt was rumpled, his hand covered his eyes, and in the slump of his shoulders there was so much fatigue and despair that my heart trembled.

  23? I asked.

  Thereabout.

  As I thought. Not long after the breakup with Moira.

  In his other hand was a lit cigarette and at his feet an ashtray stuffed with cigarette butts. I wasn’t sure why, but I tapped, Are you smoking again, btw?

  This time his answer took a while. But eventually it came. Yes.

  IN THE MORNING I WENT down to breakfast and took a seat by the window. The dining room overlooked a small lake, its water rippling in the light of the rising sun. Mother had sent some photographs of herself and her husband in rowboats. Had that been on this lake?

  “Evangeline?”

  I looked up. A man in a Fair Isle sweater and brown corduroys stood by my table. He was in his fifties and looked like a member of a local council. “Yes?”

  He extended his hand. “Doug Tipton. Nice to meet you at last.”

  Mother’s husband. I scrambled to my feet and shook his hand. “Hi. I didn’t recognize you without the beard.”

  He laughed. “Haven’t had it for at least ten years. But I guess that’s what I looked like in all the pictures your mother used to send you. Mind if I join you?”

  “No, not at all. Please.”

  He sat down. “When I came across your name on the reservation list, I thought to myself, Is that possible? But as soon as I saw you, I knew it. You look just like your mother.”

  Not something I heard every day, since most people I knew had never met my mother.

  “I’m glad you recognized me. I’d have passed you right by.”

  For the rest of breakfast, we chatted about our lives, filling each other in on the twenty-plus years since Mother died. At the end of the meal, he asked whether I had any particular plans, and when I said no, he offered to give me a tour of the farm.

  Half an hour later we found ourselves standing in a pasture that still had thin scabs of snow, looking toward a line of purple hills in the distance.

  “To think, this is where you might have grown up, had things been different,” said Doug.

  The thought was shocking—I couldn’t imagine growing up with anyone except Zelda.

  “Your mother never thought she wouldn’t be granted full or at least joint custody of you. So your father had documented evidence that she was seeing me behind his back; that didn’t mean she was an unfit mother. She made it clear that she had every intention of marrying me and raising you on this farm. No judge was going to deny a girl a chance to grow up where there’s clean air, open space, a stretch of white picket fence, and even a small apple orchard—it doesn’t get any more wholesome, quintessentially American than that.

  “But your father, he was…determined. He found out that apples and dairy cows weren’t the only things we grew here.”

  My eyes popped. Mother’s Vermont Farmer cultivated marijuana? “Pot?”

  “Pot. Shrooms. Opium poppies.”

  My eyes bulged further. My former stepfather was a minor kingpin?

  “Nothing on a serious scale, of course!” He laughed ruefully. “I was young and I was more curious than anything else. Unfortunately my curiosity extended to extracting sap from P. somniferum to make opium. I wanted to see whether it could be done—and your father had evidence that I managed it.

  “You must understand, those were the days of Just Say No and very zealous drug-law enforcement. I’d have been looking at forfeiture of house and land and a huge fine, not to mention a mandatory jail sentence, if he were to turn the evidence over to the police. Your mother had no choice but to agree to give up custody, so that he wouldn’t do exactly that.

  “She was one for holding a grudge, your mother. She was so pissed off at your father that for years she refused to exercise her visitation rights, because he had it mandated in the divorce documents that he had to be present when she saw you.”

  I sighed inwardly. I’d always known there had been a sea of bad blood between my parents. But this was even worse than I’d imagined: It was all so ordinary, everyday spite that had somehow swollen to monumental proportions.

  “And then she came to her senses one day and drove down. But when she came back and I asked her how it had gone, she kept shaking her head. Several days later she told me that she’d seen you in the park with your stepmother. And you were so happy that she felt completely unnecessary.

  “But the real blow came when your stepmother contacted her and asked whether it was all right for her to bring you up for a visit. Your mother was so excited. We cleaned and painted and baked, and I just about gave a bath to every cow on the farm. But you never came. When your mother called, she got your father, who barked that there had never been any plan for you to visit her.”

  I didn’t know about the phone call, but I did remember the plan. “He didn’t know. We were going to come when he was on a business trip to Europe. But then my stepmother had some health issues.”

  It was Zelda’s first episode after she came into our lives. That e
ntire autumn had been a dark time for all of us.

  “We got a call from her the next spring,” said Doug. “She told us that she’d been sick and apologized for the bad timing of everything. But the main thrust was that you didn’t want to come up and see your mother anymore.”

  I couldn’t remember what exactly had made me change my mind—it was so long ago. Had I feared that it had been my demands to see my mother that had led to Zelda’s episode? Or had it been a bargain I’d made with God—Keep Zelda safe and I won’t ask to see my mother again?

  Doug rubbed his palm on his clean-shaven chin. “I kept telling her that she shouldn’t let any of that stop her. It didn’t matter what your father did, or what you said you did or didn’t want: It was up to her to make the effort and build a relationship. But she was convinced that she’d already failed. That your father, and your stepmother too, possibly, had poisoned you against her.”

  “My father never talked about her at all.”

  “The whole thing was screwed up, wasn’t it?” Doug sighed. “She thought the only way you two could have a relationship would be after you grew up. But she didn’t live long enough for it.”

  The day after Bennett had retorted, What don’t I know about abandonment issues?, I’d had a flash of insight. His attempts to take over the family firm hadn’t been only about Moira. There had also been a deep anger against his parents—for leaving and never coming back.

  I’d expected to deal with a similar anger. My mother had failed in many ways: She’d been too obdurate at the beginning and too much of a quitter at the end.

  But there had been no malice in her failure, only a lot of fucked-upness.

  And with everything I now knew, the pictures she’d sent took on a whole new light. Instead of a glamorous showcase, as I’d always taken them to be, they were actually desperate appeals from a woman who didn’t know how else to be a part of my life. Look at this, said her pictures. Don’t you want to be here? Don’t you want to join us in our rustic idyll? Come. Do come.

  We were all fucked-up. And we were all fuckups by choice. My father chose not to change. My mother chose not to engage. And I chose to pretend that nothing was the matter, that I was—and had always been—the most perfect girl living the most perfect life.

  FOUR HOURS LATER, I PULLED into a rest stop somewhere in Massachusetts, to stretch my legs and check my phone for messages.

  There was an e-mail from Zelda, who had reunited with quite a few friends and relatives at Mrs. Asquith’s funeral the previous day and gone out for dinner afterward. The first attachment showed a large group around a dinner table. Larry was there, a few seats down from her.

  I thought the other attachment would also be a shot of dinner. Instead it was a shot of Bennett, standing before the still-open grave, looking somber and thoughtful in a long black overcoat.

  The phone dinged—Zelda had e-mailed again.

  I forgot to tell you, darling. Bennett found an earlier flight and left yesterday evening. He must already be back in the city.

  With the time difference, he’d have landed late last night. I didn’t hesitate long before I texted him. You didn’t tell me you’re already back.

  I thought you knew.

  You’re not working today, are you?

  No. Headed for Cos Cob now. And I have your tiara.

  What?

  Mrs. Asquith left you her tiara, the one you wore in that picture. Now you’re a real princess. When are you coming to rescue me? From lung cancer, if nothing else.

  He was joking, of course, but not entirely. I was the only one who could rescue him from his heartache and disappointment, I who loved him, but didn’t have the courage of my conviction.

  I resumed driving, but at the next rest stop I again pulled off the highway.

  It was a sunny day. A family of four were having chips and sandwiches on a nearby picnic table. I opened my windows a crack, and in came the noise of a car zooming by.

  My phone sat on the passenger seat, waiting.

  One does not simply walk into Mordor.

  Except, as I’d told Bennett, that was exactly what one did, one foot before the other, for thousands of miles.

  I picked up the phone, my heart thumping hard against my rib cage. I’d never known anything but this pretense of strength and serenity. Never known what it was like to voluntarily expose the rawness underneath. Never known how life was to be lived, except behind all the closed doors in the world, and with a high wall thrown in too.

  I’m fragile, I typed as quickly as my fingers could move, the fragility of a hopeless romantic trapped in a reality in which there is no happily ever after.

  I hit send—and covered my mouth as the phone made the tiny whooshing sound of bytes being delivered at the speed of electrons. The muscles of my right calf twitched. Tiny involuntary whimpers escaped my throat. The tips of my fingers tingled, as if their circulation had been cut off.

  But it had happened: I had taken the first step toward destroying the ring in the fires of Mount Doom.

  Some people outgrow their fragility. I never did. Instead I became proficient at packaging it. Have you ever encountered a product that comes in a box covered with duct tape, which opens to an explosion of packing peanuts, and then you are faced with layers of tightly taped bubble wrap, only to find after that there’s :still: a hard plastic shell that’s a pain in the ass to pry apart?

  That’s me. Except I never let anyone get past the duct-tape stage. Okay, maybe occasionally Zelda saw the packing peanuts, but no further, no deeper.

  I read over what I’d written and felt like an underground creature suddenly exposed to air and sunlight, wriggling desperately to get back to the stale darkness I knew so well.

  Too late.

  So what’s underneath it all? Fear, yes. Need, so much of it. More wishful thinking than there is in the entire country on a Powerball weekend. Maybe greed too, a greed for happiness that’s matched only by the fear of losing it.

  I exhaled, every last one of my muscles tight and knotty. But I was almost done. Almost.

  You told me you’re not afraid of the baggage I bring. You might be the only one. I believe that if I were sitting on a mountain of pure gold, most dragons, including Smaug himself, would prefer to hire themselves out as furnaces, rather than face the trouble of dealing with me.

  That said, I’m coming to rescue you. Brace yourself.

  I PARKED MY RENTAL CAR outside Bennett’s house and rang the bell.

  The door opened quickly.

  “Evangeline!” said Mrs. Somerset. Her eyes widened as she took in the bouquet of gladioluses I had in one arm, the bag of takeout in my other arm, two large heart-shaped Mylar balloons, the ribbons of which had been wound around my wrist, and the big princess gown I’d rented from a Greenwich costume shop. “What a lovely surprise! Come in! Come in!”

  Shit. I never thought to ask whether his parents had come with him to Cos Cob.

  Mrs. Somerset took the flowers from me and called toward the interior of the house, “Bennett, Rowland, Evangeline is here.”

  I followed, my face as red as the balloons, only because I couldn’t run. Where was I going to go, looking like a huge blue meringue?

  “They’re still outside,” explained Mrs. Somerset. “I came in to get a drink of water; that’s how I heard the doorbell. Let me take you to the kitchen so you can put everything down.”

  Maybe there was time for me to sneak away to my car and change out of the stupid costume. Maybe—

  As we entered the kitchen, so did Bennett and his dad from the door leading in from the backyard. Mr. Somerset grinned at my surfeit of romantic gestures. Bennett, after a moment of stunned stillness, was trying not to laugh out loud.

  I narrowed my eyes at him, as I set down the stuff I’d brought.

  “Wonderful to see you again, Evangeline,” said Mr. Somerset. “It’s really too bad that my wife and I must head back to the city now. We’re having dinner with friends.”

 
; “Oh, right,” said his wife. “I almost forgot. Let me grab my handbag.”

  “Take my car,” said Bennett. “I can get it back from the station later.”

  We saw his parents off and Bennett burst out laughing, collapsing against the doorjamb.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  He tried, only to succumb again. I rolled my eyes, went back to the kitchen, and found a vase for the gladioluses.

  When I set down the bouquet on the kitchen island, I saw a hardcover notebook exactly like the one Mrs. Asquith had given to Bennett when we visited her. I flipped it open, thinking it was the same one.

  But on the inside cover was the image of Bennett that I’d seen at his parents’ house, the one with him in his Eton uniform, looking to his left. Except here, on the opposite page, was a picture of Mrs. Asquith, her lips pursed, her cane raised in mock threat toward him.

  An inscription read, To my young hooligan. What a shame you never gave me a reason to use that cane on you. Your favorite old lady, bar none.

  I smiled, my heart melting like ice cream on a hot sidewalk. The notebook was actually a custom photo book, with pictures of them together throughout the years, in her house and all over the world. The last image made me suck in a breath in surprise. It was the three of us at lunch that day—I remembered now that she’d asked Larry to take a photo.

  Bennett stood between us, one hand on Mrs. Asquith’s shoulder, the other on mine. And on this page Mrs. Asquith had written, Have faith, my dear, it will happen. I wish the two of you a wonderful life together.

  My phone pinged with an incoming text. Bennett.

  I’ve known, since the moment I first saw you in Central Park, that you’re fragile. When I came across your princess picture within minutes, that impression was only further reinforced.

  But sometimes people forget that there is no strength greater than that of the fragile who carry on in spite of their fragility. You are strong. You have always been. And I hope today you proved it to yourself beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  I’ve missed you. And there are no words to tell you how much I love being rescued with food, flowers, and balloons. But did you forget the chocolates in the car?