It wasn’t until the next day that she read, online, the newspaper story about the accident, with a photograph of the mangled motorcycle Coco had been riding on and the name of the man who’d been driving it.Timothy Pouliot.
Sitting at her desk, her hands shaking, she googled his obituary.
All this time, Timmy Pouliot had remained, in Eleanor’s mind, a perpetual boy, but he’d been forty-eight years old. Survivors included his mother, Ruth, a brother, Ray, three sisters, Carol Anne, Jill, and Anita. Twelve nieces and nephews.
Eleanor studied the photograph in the newspaper. Black and white, it failed to convey Timmy’s most striking feature. The extraordinary blue of his eyes.
She thought about a night a few years back, not the last time she’d seen Timmy Pouliot—when, she now guessed, he must already have been seeing Coco, and panicked at the sight of Eleanor—but the time before that. It was in a sports bar near Fenway Park. She’d run into him on one of those awful dates she kept going on for a while with men she met online. Timmy must have come into town to see a Red Sox game.
She was heading to the ladies’ room, counting the minutes for the evening to be over, so she could say goodbye forever to Phil, the orthodontist, who looked ten years older and forty pounds heavier than his picture on Match.com. She had just spent an interminable ninety minutes listening to him talk about dental implants. All she wanted was to get back home.
Leaned against the bar watching the postgame wrap-up, he had spotted her. He’d been alone. Funny how, that night, he had no longer been Timmy Pouliot to Eleanor. Just Timmy.
It was getting close to off-season, that time of year when Timmyfound himself between girlfriends. His face lit up when he saw Eleanor.
“I didn’t think you hung out in places like this,” he said to her.
“I’m on a date,” she told him. “But not for long.”
“I would have brought you here,” he told her. “If you’d let me. I would have brought you someplace nicer.”
He set his bottle down on the bar. Behind him on the screen they were playing game highlights. The Red Sox slaughtering the San Diego Padres. He’d always looked so young, but that night he didn’t.
“I would have taken you anywhere,” he told her.
She had studied his face then as if for the first time. All those Friday nights she’d spent in his apartment, times he ran a bath for her and sat on the edge of the tub or the toilet seat, listening to her stories about what was going on with her marriage, what was going on with her children, what was going on with the farm—sometimes just letting her cry, and after, when he held her, and they made love. Looking back now over those times, she realized they had been the best times she’d ever known with a man.
It had never occurred to Eleanor that Timmy Pouliot could be anything other than a sweet boy who used to play softball with the man she used to be married to, who had swept her away on his motorcycle when she needed to disappear.
“You were always my dream girl, you know,” he said to Eleanor that night at the bar.
“You need to find somebody your own age and have a couple of kids with her,” she told him. “And anyway, I’m not your type.”
“What type would that be, exactly?” he’d asked her. “Did you think there was some set of rules out there to tell you how love works?”
She did, actually. All these years, she had supposed there was a rule book out there on how things were supposed to go in relationships. She just never got a copy. She had been so busy assuming she got everything wrong that she totally missed it when the possibility was revealed to her that maybe there had been something very good going on, or something good enough, anyway, right in front of her. Or two flights up. On a waterbed.
97.
Invitation to a Wedding
Elijah called the next morning. Evan and Betsy were there at the hospital with him, and Toby, who had insisted on being there with his brother. At first it had appeared they’d need to amputate Coco’s leg, but in the end they managed to save it. A team of surgeons put two metal rods in her. Then came another surgery for her broken pelvis and broken jaw.
When Elijah called Eleanor again a few days later, the news was better. His mother was going to be all right, more or less. No more cartwheels. She’d walk with a limp, but she’d walk.
“I guess I won’t be coming to Brookline for a while,” Elijah told Eleanor. “My mom’s going to need me.”
He stayed with Coco at her parents’ house after she got out of the hospital. Six months later, she moved somewhere in upstate New York with a girlfriend of hers who ran a spa and gave her a job. She couldn’t stay on her feet long enough to give massage, but she could sit at the front desk. The band that had just hired Elijah got a recording contract, and he moved to L.A.
Cam remained on the farm with Toby, of course, working with his physical therapy clients. Eleanor hardly ever went to L.A. anymore, though she flew out once, when Elijah’s band opened at the Hollywood Bowl.
Ursula and Jake were having another baby. Eleanor heard this from Toby and Elijah, who visited them in Vermont sometimes, but Eleanor herself heard nothing from her daughter. The more hopeful news was that after more than five years in which there had been no communication other than a card on her birthday and one on Mother’s Day, Al had started calling Eleanor up, checking in with her, talking about the software company he’d started and his lifewith Teresa, asking about hers. The first time he’d called, out of the blue, they had spoken only briefly—the conversation uneasy. Then he was calling more. She knew the name of his dog, and that he and Teresa had taken a trip to Oaxaca, and that his start-up was doing so well, he and Teresa were buying a building outside Seattle. One time he asked Eleanor if she’d send him the recipe for her spaghetti carbonara. “We’ve tried making it, Mom,” he told her. “But it never turns out as good as yours.”
You could say this was a whole new person she was getting to know. Or you could say he was the person he’d been all along—just happy, finally. What mattered was, he’d found someone he loved, someone who loved him, and they were getting married. Families didn’t always look the way you pictured them. And even if they did, that was just about never the real story.
“Don’t you think it’s about time we saw each other?” Eleanor asked him one Sunday. “Soon, I promise,” he told her. Three days later, the invitation to his wedding arrived.
98.
