Claire was cruising on all of the furniture, you couldn’t take your eyes off of her. Abigail was having nightmares; Matty needed glasses. Louisa was teaching a full-time course load and working on her first book. If she didn’t get tenure, she’d be out. If she didn’t publish, she wouldn’t get tenure. The academic world was brutal like that. The nanny decided to go to school to become a physical therapist; they needed another nanny.
For Steven: investor meetings. Long hours, a small staff, a studio in Brooklyn. Content, content, content.
Louisa. Tenure, finally, in 2017. She thought the pressure would ease up then, but it only increased. She needed to publish another book. Every now and then, taking the F train from Prospect Park, walking past a urine-soaked person sleeping outside the Broadway-Lafayette stop, looking at the website of the private school she wanted to send Matty to and gasping out loud at the price, Louisa still thought of Reed’s campus and the open, manageable spaces of Oregon, the relative affordability.
2019. Martin and Annie made their annual visit to Brooklyn—they came on the long October weekend, when summer in Owls Head had wound down, and they stayed for three nights. On the last night Martin and Annie always treated the McLeans to dinner out at a local family restaurant, or, if a sitter was available, a fancier dinner for just the adults. That year the high school junior they sometimes employed was free, so Louisa made a reservation at Fausto. The meal was lovely and decadent. At one point, Louisa noticed her father staring into space while Steven was talking. This was unlike him; Martin was an accomplished conversationalist.
They finished their espresso; Annie went to the ladies’ room. Martin was frowning at the bill.
“Dad?” Louisa said. “Everything okay?” Her father’s brow was furrowed. He took off his reading glasses, frowned more, rubbed his eyes, put them back on.
“The tax—” Martin’s voice trailed off. “I can’t figure out the tip, that’s all. The tax is off... this doesn’t make any sense. Can you have a look at this?”
Steven and Louisa glanced at each other. Martin was a whiz with math. He did his own taxes; he claimed that in college physics problems relaxed him. Louisa studied the bill. The dinner had been expensive—no wonder she and Steven would never dine at Fausto on their own!—but the tax was perfectly correct, and thetip was easily figured, even by a numbers-challenged history professor like herself. “Fifty-two,” she said. “The tip should be fifty-two dollars, Daddy.”
“Of course.” He smiled. “Of course it is. Fifty-two.” Just then Annie reappeared, her lipstick freshly applied. “There she is!” said Martin, his brow smoother, his eyes bright. “My lovely bride. All is well.” He reached out his hand for Annie’s as she regained her seat.
“All is well,” said Annie. Something in her glance unsettled Louisa. A knot of concern bloomed in her stomach, another in her ribs.
Slow days, fast years? No. Annie called seven months later, to tell Louisa that she was taking Martin in for evaluation with a neurologist at Maine Medical, and she called again when they had the diagnosis in hand. No, that wasn’t right, that the days were slow. It wasallgoing fast.
12.
Pauline
When there’s a week left to go in June Pauline brings two containers of soup—one, her famous chicken noodle, and the other a fish chowder, new recipe, she’d gotten it off the Internet—to her cousin Marilyn, who lives off South Shore Drive down a funny little road called Cripple Creek Lane.
Marilyn’s husband, Eddie, lets Pauline in. He’s on the quiet side by nature, but now Pauline can see by the way he keeps his eyes down, hardly greeting her, he’s gone positively silent. He captains a lobster boat just like Billy, but he didn’t even put the boat in the water this April so he could care for Marilyn after the cancer budded in a kidney, then jumped to the liver, and has now spread itself out through her body.
What not having the boat in the water must mean for their finances Pauline can’t even begin to imagine. She knows how thatmuscle in Billy’s jaw moves after just one bad week on the water, never mind a whole lost season.
Marilyn lies in a hospital bed in her front room. It’s the sort of bed the patient can lift or lower at will, and Marilyn has it set halfway between upright and lying down. Pauline sits in the straight-backed chair angled in a certain way beside the bed so Marilyn doesn’t have to turn her head to look at her.
“I brought soup,” says Pauline. “Two kinds, both labeled. I put them in the fridge. But I can go warm you up some, if you want. Do you think you might eat a bit of soup, Lynnie?”
“Oh, Pauline,” Marilyn says. “Thank you. Thank you so much.” Her small gray eyes are wet. “I’m hardly eating at all. But this will mean the world to Eddie. I know he misses my cooking.”
“Maybe just a spoonful,” says Pauline, starting to rise from the chair.
Marilyn is three years older than Pauline, but now the difference between them could be a dozen years, or more. Marilyn’s face, always smooth and small and brown, has become shriveled and old, with new dips and crevices, more walnut than acorn.
“Not now,” says Marilyn. “Sit, sit. Really, I couldn’t take even a bite right now. And it’s been so long since I’ve seen you, Polly.”
“Oh, come on now,” says Pauline sharply. “I was just here a week ago. On my day off.” She sounds sharp because she’s scared. She doesn’t like seeing Marilyn like this, one week worse than she was the last time.
Marilyn smiles slightly in that vague, almost secretive way she now has. Pauline noticed the strangeness of the smile last time she was here.
“I thought I was dreaming that,” she says. “Time is running together.”
“I suppose that can happen—” says Pauline. She stops herself before saying,in the end, the way she almost did. “I mean, thathappens to all of us,” she says instead. “Half the time I don’t even know what day it is.” This is not true. Pauline always knows what day it is, and what time too. She thinks about the Chief, who recently asked her if his suit was pressed for court. There’s a man who doesn’t know which end is up.
“I don’t think it will be long now,” Marilyn says dreamily. Pauline sees that there’s a tube coming out of Marilyn’s arm and the tube runs away behind her back to something that Pauline can’t see. Another piece of the tube goes to a small black button on the side of Marilyn’s bed. Every now and then Marilyn presses the button with her thumb and afterward she sighs.
“For the pain,” whispers Marilyn, when she sees Pauline watching.
There was a time—oh, early high school, or perhaps earlier than that, seventh or eighth grade—when Pauline looked up to Marilyn with such ardor it felt almost like a hurt. Marilyn used to pick up Pauline in her daddy’s pickup truck and drive them into Rockland or out to Camden. Radio on, windows down, wind in their hair and on their young skin. Joyriding, it was called back then. Cruising.
“Does it hurt very much?” Pauline asks Marilyn.
