He took two very small objects out of his pocket. At first Eleanor might have thought they were rocks, but they weren’t. They were made from corks, with bits of yarn and pipe cleaners attached, and faces. A man and a woman.
“You can let them go in the brook sometime,” he said. “Don’t worry if you lose them, or it looks like they sink.”
He paused and looked at them. His brother and his new wife, first. Then the cork people. “They’ll always be out there someplace. The ocean, maybe.”
There was dancing—a DJ, playing songs Eleanor did not know, mostly, though there were a few she did (“thrown in for our parents,” Al explained)—Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, VanMorrison, the Beatles. Also Selena. Freddy Fender. In honor of Toby, but also the recent news of Michael Jackson, he played “Billie Jean.”
Louise stayed out on the dance floor for a good hour before Jake took her off to the house—the house that remained, the new one—to sleep.
When Ursula returned to the tent, she was carrying a box. She made her way to the table where her family was sitting and, dirty as it was, set the box on the tablecloth.
“Our time capsule,” she said. “The way it worked out, we never had to dig it up after all.”
Who would have guessed this? When the tree came down, and the roots pulled away from the earth, there it was: the time capsule the children had buried twenty-four years before.
If they thought they might find something profound inside—words that might suddenly illuminate their lives—they were disappointed. What they found, when they got the box pried open, was a package of Silly String, a Matchbox truck, a rock, a My Little Pony, a quarter with the date 1985, and a Snickers bar.
Then they noticed three worn-looking envelopes, each with a name on the front: Alison, Ursula, Toby. Al opened his first and read out loud the words he’d written almost a quarter century before, when he was eight years old.
“Dear Future Self,” the note began. “I hope when you read this that you are happy, and I hope you turned into a good person. I hope you have your own computer. I think there will be a big future in programming. I bet your parents are going to be really sorry they didn’t do what you told them and buy stock in Microsoft.”
Ursula’s next. “Dear Future Self. I hope by the time you read this, you aren’t still this perfect person all the time. I hope you get to be real, finally.”
“Der Foootur Slf,” Toby had written. He’d been four years old, and still in possession of his fully functioning brain, when he wrote the note he now read out loud, grinning. “I hop u get gotes. I hop u r hapy.”
“And I am!” he called out, hearing this. “And I did.”
Eleanor danced. With Al, with Louise, with Teresa’s father, José, and with Sal Perrone, who asked how long she was going to be in town.
She had thought about asking Cam to dance with her, as parents of the groom, but having seen the difficulty with which he’d made his way to the microphone earlier—Cam, the one of the Yellow Jackets who used to get around the bases faster than anyone—it seemed to Eleanor that he was in no small amount of pain. Dancing to some hip-hop song was the last thing he needed. And truthfully, she didn’t have any desire for that, either, though when they played “Teach Your Children,” she had to step out of the tent for a moment. That song always got to her.
... just look at them and sigh, and know they love you.
She looked out to the field—the peach tree they’d planted, the woods where the lady’s slippers came up every year, the cornflowers. When she turned around, he was standing there. Cam.
“Most of what the kids like nowadays isn’t our kind of music, I guess,” he said. “I bet the young ones never heard of Crosby, Stills and Nash.”
“I’m sorry about the house,” she told him. “The tree.”
“Nothing stays the same forever,” he said. “If there’s one thing life has taught me, it’s that.”
“You probably aren’t up for a walk,” she said. It was a question.
“The waterfall? I could handle that.”
100.
You Who Are on the Road
It was a stretch of road Eleanor must have traveled a thousand times over the years: first, alone, when she’d just bought the house, with her sketchbook and her pencils, setting off to draw, then pregnant that first time, and after, with Alison buckled into her Snugli and Sally following alongside, wagging.
When Ursula came along, they’d bought a stroller. Eleanor had studied the fancy model in a catalog and dreamed about getting it, the way some women dreamed about jewelry or cars.
All they could afford at the time was a very cheap one—the old umbrella style, which was difficult to push over a road as bumpy as this one, so bumpy in fact that often Cam just picked the whole thing up—stroller, baby, and all—and carried it the last stretch of road to the waterfall. She could see him now—his long, strong first baseman’s arms holding the sides of the flimsy stroller, with Alison bundled into her bunny suit, strapped into the seat, her face serious, even then. Cam had lifted her over his head like an Olympian showing off his trophy to the crowd.Just look what we made. A person.
Once they were old enough, the children made the trip to the waterfall on their own steam—talking about that day’s events as they made their way down the road, Toby skipping ahead, looking for turtles and efts, interesting rocks—the three of them singing the Seven Dwarfs’ song fromSnow White.Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.
When they got close to the place where the brook raced over the boulders—the water so loud in the weeks of first runoff that you had to yell to be heard—Eleanor made sure they held each other’s hands.
