“We’re safe,” he said. “I won’t let you fall through.”
The months after the birth of Ursula, that July, stretched out in a kind of milky blur for Eleanor. There was always someone who needed to be fed and held and someone who needed to be changed and a basket of laundry to be washed and a sinkful of dishes to be washed and somewhere in there, someone had to be earning a living. That turned out to be Eleanor, mostly. Cam was an endlessly entertaining father—funny and tender and surprising. You never knew when he might burst into the door with a jar of tadpoles he’d collected in the brook for the children to keep in a bucket and study, or a hand-carved dog he’d made for Alison (he spent all day on that), or, one winter, a snowy owl he found dead on the road, frozen in a storm and perfectly intact. One day he came home with a stack of 45s from the 1960s that he’d picked up at a yard sale on the way back from a craft fair. Alison was only three at the time, and Ursula only just walking, but they put them on, one after another, and had a dance party in the kitchen—with Ursula in Eleanor’s arms and Alison on Cam’s shoulders.
More than anything, he loved showing them artifacts from the natural world: he’d put his hand in his pocket and, when it emerged, set down a strange, mysterious pellet that turned out to be animal scat—coyote, possibly, or fox, or moose even—that, when you picked it apart, contained small pieces of bones and fur from whatever the animal whose scat it was had eaten for dinner the night before. He knew the names of the constellations and the stories that went with them, and he could carve a doll with his penknife or make a fort out of an old cardboard box covered with an umbrella. He brought home finger paint, and let the girls cover one whole wall of the garage with it.
Still he wasn’t the kind of father with whom Eleanor could leave two small children for a stretch of hours while she worked. She’dset up a desk at one end of the kitchen, close enough to keep an eye on the children, but it was hard to concentrate there. “I’m happy to help you out,” he’d say—a phrase that would once have sounded benign but now struck Eleanor as carrying with it the implicit belief that primary care of their children rested with her. She started to say something about his easy, offhand assumption but stopped herself.
There had been a time, and it lasted years, when all Eleanor supposed she needed was to love someone deeply, someone who loved her back, and she had this now. And she had her family—the thing she’d wanted above all else. But there was also, now, a place in her where something like a small, hard nut of resentment resided. She could almost feel it there sometimes—watching the cool ease of the way Cam mounted his bicycle and headed out on a ride some Saturday morning, with the dishes from the waffles he’d made—he was a joyous but messy cook—still stacked high in the sink.
“When do I get to take a Saturday morning off to go on an adventure?” she asked, out in the driveway as he pumped up the tires.
“Be honest with yourself, El,” he said to her. “Do you actually see yourself getting on a mountain bike on a Saturday morning?”
He had nailed it, of course. So much time had passed in which she had no time that she no longer knew what she’d do with herself if she had any.
18.
People You Care About Start Dying
Ursula was still in diapers, and Alison not so long out of them, when Eleanor realized she was pregnant again. This time, it had not been the result of a romantic interlude with a soundtrack from Al Green, or a dinner by the fire after the kids went to bed, with a bottle of wine. Those didn’t happen anymore. She had been flat-out for so long, she just hadn’t noticed the small tear in her diaphragm. Maybe she’d even noticed, but she hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet. She’d gotten pregnant once before, while breastfeeding—but even though she only nursed Ursula at bedtimes now, she’d allowed herself to believe it couldn’t happen a second time.
That August, the day of the lunar eclipse—their daughters three and a half and two—Cam piled everyone in the truck to get the best view from the top of Hopewell Hill. “Maybe they won’t remember,” he said. “I just like to show them things.”
This was what you did. You took your children out in the darkness to watch the moon disappear. You dissected coyote scat with them. You led your two-year-old down to the garden to press a handful of radish seeds into the soil and handed her the spatula to lick when you made chocolate pudding and turned the pages ofRichard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?,pointing out the animal characters and naming their jobs. You gathered autumn leaves, pressed them with an iron in between two sheets of wax paper, and taped them on the window, where you’d set an avocado seed in a glass of water to watch it sprout; and carried your three-year-old outside in your arms at night—her and her sister—to let them catch snowflakes. Who knew what they’d remember, and what they’d make of it, but the hope was there that if nothing else, what they would holdon to from these times was the knowledge of being deeply loved. You showed your children the world. It was up to them to determine what they’d make of it.
One morning that December—Alison nearing her fourth birthday, Ursula two and a half, Eleanor two weeks away from her due date—Walt stopped by with a load of firewood. As he was throwing the split logs off the back of his truck, he asked if they’d heard the news. “Remember those boys they had onEd Sullivana while back?” he said. “The ones with the hair, that all the girls used to scream about? You know the one with the Japanese wife?”
Nobody but Walt would have chosen to identify John Lennon as one of the singers fromEd Sullivan.
“Somebody shot him last night,” he said. “Dead on the spot.”
Walt was saying something else now, about New York City—how dangerous it was, why would anyone want to live there? Eleanor couldn’t focus on the rest of what he was saying.
“I figured you’d want to know,” he told her. “Seeing as how you’re always playing those records.”
Eleanor went back in the house. She thought about that Sunday night so long ago, at her parents’ house in Newton, when she’d heard the Beatles for the first time—she and a few million other people. She had been ten years old. Most of the girls liked Paul the best, but for Eleanor it was always John. The picture came to her of Charlie, her dog, lashed to the roof of the police officer’s car that day, shot for chasing deer. She stood at the sink, watching Alison, on the couch with a half-eaten bagel, Ursula propped up on pillows beside her with her bottle, the gaze of her two daughters totally focused on the television screen, where Bert was explaining to Ernie why it was a good idea to carry an umbrella.
So much is going to happen to them.
There was nothing she and Cam could do about most of it.
She heard his truck in the driveway. When he came in the door, he put his arms around Eleanor. He’d heard the news in the car, driving home from town.
“I know it’s crazy to be this sad about someone I never knew,” shesaid. “When people are dying every day, all over the world. I just never pictured it happening to one of the Beatles.”
“The older you get, the more bad things happen,” he said. “Good ones, too. People you care about start dying. There’s no getting around it.”
19.
A Web-Footed Boy
The odds were long, given what she knew about the gene for red hair—recessive—but finally, with their son Toby, they got their red-headed baby. A Christmas Day boy, he burst into the world weighing ten pounds, and howling. A couple of hours after his delivery, holding him against her breast, examining every inch of him, she had discovered a magical trait. The first of many, as it turned out.
“Our son has a webbed foot,” she told Cam, not with any dismay. More like wonderment.
“Maybe he’ll swim the English Channel,” Cam said. “Or to Cuba.”
“I get this feeling he’s going to be different from the other two,” Eleanor said. “Not just because he’s a boy, or a redhead. He’s like some foundling child who shows up in the cabbage patch. Like some magic person.”
