“Don’t you get lonely, out here by yourself?” he said to her once.
“I was an only child,” she said. “I’m used to it.” The loneliest she’d ever been, probably, was in the front seat of Matt Hallinan’s car,though nights with her parents back at their house, in Crazyland, came close. There was more than one way of feeling lonely.
Fall came. Her tomato plants were hit with frost. The ash tree’s leaves turned red and for a week every time she stepped out the door of the house she just stood there, taking in the color and the way the light illuminated them, the brilliance of that red against the sky. The leaves fell, and the branches were bare against the sky—brown leaves swirling in the wind. By three thirty she had to turn the lights on over her desk. There was an album of very sad Irish ballads she loved, and one by Leonard Cohen, with “Suzanne” on it, that she played so much it was all scratched up. She lit candles and sketched images of the new Bodie adventure, as distant from anything going on in her own life as Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. Sometimes she made popcorn for dinner. More often than not she was in bed by nine.
Driving into town at the end of the day—Charlie in the seat beside her, with the window cracked even though it was cold, so he could take in all the smells—she could see into the houses of the families along the road, fixing dinner and watching TV. Maybe things weren’t really all that great in those houses, but through the windows, it looked pretty nice.
The first time Eleanor built a fire in the woodstove the house filled up so swiftly with smoke that she opened all the windows. The next day she called Walt, who told her she’d left the dampers shut. After he cleaned the chimney he told her she was lucky to have avoided a fire. “That thing was so full of creosote, it’s a wonder any smoke got out at all,” he said.
“You can always call me. Not easy, a girl like you living by herself way out here like this without a family. Without a man.”
She heard from Patty now and then. Her old roommate was finishing college a year early, engaged to a Yale guy she’d met at a mixer, pre-med. “My mom always asks about you,” she said. “You should come for Christmas this year. My brother asks about you, too.”
Patty wrote again six months later. Engagement off. Her ex-fiancéhad wanted to settle down and start having babies right away and she wanted a career. She had moved into an apartment in New York City, the Upper East Side. Just a studio, but it had a balcony where she could set up a fondue pot. She’d gone out with her brother and his girlfriend to some club where she saw Liza Minnelli. At least she thought it was Liza Minnelli. It could have been some guy dressed up like her.
Eleanor did not pay a visit to the Hallinans that Christmas, preferring to spend the holiday alone with Charlie.
That winter, the snow was so deep it covered most of the downstairs windows, and even with the furnace going—also the woodstove—it was so cold she slept with a hot water bottle. Days went by, sometimes, when she wouldn’t make it down the driveway to pick up her mail, though when she did she could usually count on at least one letter, forwarded from her publisher, from a child who’d read one of her books.
“I love how brave Bodie is,” one girl wrote to her. “I wish I was brave like that. I get scared just asking for a hall pass at school.”
“I never told anyone this before,” another child wrote. “But my dad hits me a lot. Sometimes I like to pretend I could be Bodie, and just go away someplace by myself and have adventures like she does, with nobody yelling at me or saying I’m stupid or taking out their belt.”
When Eleanor got letters from children about her books, she always wrote back.
Months passed, marked by days at her desk, late-afternoon walks with Charlie to Hopewell Falls. She saw Timmy Pouliot now and then, fishing with his brother at the falls or riding his dirt bike through town. If he recognized her, he showed no sign.
10.
Wish I Had a River
Eleanor had been living on the farm for two years now. Days went by sometimes in which she barely spoke, except to her agent or her editor or her dog, and occasionally Walt and Edith, on her daily walk to the waterfall.
There was a woman Eleanor observed sometimes at the swimming hole. She had a little girl, and the two of them would sit on a flat stone by the edge of the swimming hole and dangle their feet in the water to cool off. The woman didn’t swim and the little girl didn’t go in the water, either. She’d stay for about as long as it took to smoke a cigarette, then pick up her daughter, gather her toys in a bag, and head back to her car, an old Chevy so rusted Eleanor wondered how it ever passed inspection. Something about this woman—sitting on the rock, staring out at the water—made Eleanor want to be her friend.
One time, the woman looked so upset that Eleanor had spoken to her. “Are you okay? Anything I can do to help?”
“No big deal,” the woman said. “It’s just my husband. I should leave the jerk. But it’s not like I’ve got anyplace to go.”
Her name was Darla. Her daughter was called Kimmie. “Why don’t you come over for tea?” Eleanor said.
Darla showed up with a six-pack.
“No offense,” she told Eleanor, “but I never understood this whole tea thing. Sitting around drinking hot water with a bag of crumbled-up leaves.”
They sat in the living room with their Budweisers. Darla took it all in: the vases of cut flowers, the Matisse reproduction tacked to the wall, the plate of Brie, the record albums. She spotted a box ofbooks on the table, newly arrived from Eleanor’s publisher. With Eleanor’s name on the front.
“Hey, that’s you,” she said, studying the picture on the back.
“You should take one for your little girl,” Eleanor told her.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Darla said. “Wild guess.”
Darla wasn’t, either, it turned out. She came from northern Maine. Potato country.
“We were a mill family,” she said. “You know what that means? Payday’s Friday. You can count on your dad being drunk through Sunday night, hungover Monday.”
Darla’s father had a habit of slapping her mother around when he was drinking. “I guess with five kids and no job of her own, she figured there wasn’t much she could do about that.”
