“Here’s all I know,” Cam said. “We’re outnumbered now.”
Even then Toby had this surprisingly deep voice. He was like a man trapped in a baby’s body, she used to say. Impatient to grow up.
Eleanor loved her children equally, but Toby occupied a particular place in her heart. It seemed to Cam and Eleanor as if he’d landed from another galaxy—a strange and miraculous alien baby come to live at their house.
He had the most unusual ears, like shells, but pointed at the tips. Somewhere in those first minutes Eleanor spent inspecting every inch of her new son’s body she had discovered a thin, almost transparent piece of skin connecting each of the toes on his left foot—only the left, and very briefly this had worried her, though soon enough her son’s webbed left foot would become another of the things sheloved about this otherworldly child. When Ursula and Alison’s friends came over to play, the girls would remove his shoe and his sock, if he wasn’t barefoot already, to display this magical feature of their amazing brother.
He was born in the bathtub, and maybe because of this he seemed drawn to water. Wherever a body of water lay, Toby made his way to it and, whenever possible, jumped in. The special toes on his left foot made him swim fast as an otter, he told them. Or a muskrat. Where had he learned about muskrats? In some other lifetime, maybe.
Alison had not yet reached her fourth birthday when Toby joined the family, but she begged to hold her brother, and Eleanor knew Alison would sooner let her arm fall off than drop that baby. He had entered the world the way he entered every room, from that moment on—like a rodeo bull released from the pen, bucking and kicking. Though there was this other side to Toby. Of the three children, he was the one most hungry for touch, the one for whom rubbing up against the skin of another human being seemed more vital than food.
In that brief stretch of months before he started crawling—something he did younger than the others, or any baby she’d ever observed—Eleanor kept his infant seat on the girls’ craft table at a height at which Ursula, when she ran through the room in the middle of some game, could pat his head as she flew by, like Cam’s beloved left fielder Carl Yastrzemski tagging third base on the way to completing a game-tying home run. His eyes stayed locked on his sisters as they ran past him, off to play in the snow or dig in the sand. Even then you could tell how crazy it drove Toby that he couldn’t run after his sisters, but once he could crawl, then run, he never stopped. Wherever the girls went, he followed.
That March—when Toby was just three months old—they made their cork people for the first time, and the boats to bring them on their journey along the brook. The idea had come to them on a morning right after Ali’s birthday. After a solid month of below-freezing temperatures, a freakishly warm couple of days had melted much of the snow, and when they took their daily walk to the falls,they saw how the water had risen from all the runoff. Water crashed over the rocks; the brook was running again.
“If only we had a boat,” Alison said. “We could float down the stream.”
It wasn’t a river, of course. The brook was only a few feet wide in most places. Deep enough for trout, but not for the kind of vessel that might transport a person. But when they got home, Eleanor announced they were making boats to sail down the river.
“We need people,” Ursula said. “To ride in the boats.”
“No problem,” Eleanor said. “We’ll make some.”
So they crafted a half dozen little boats, and the day after, with the water racing faster than ever, they brought them to the brook—Eleanor holding tight to the girls’ hands, one on each side, with Toby in the front pack.
They spent most of the afternoon launching their boats and running along the water’s edge, following them. When they got back to the house, Eleanor made hot chocolate.
“Let’s always do that,” Ursula said. “Every year. Our family tradition.”
That was Ursula for you. She never wanted anything to change. Neither did Eleanor, actually. The difference was, she knew, as her children didn’t yet, that this was impossible.
20.
This Was Her Artwork
Sitting in the front of Eleanor’s shopping cart at the checkout one time, Ursula had spotted an issue ofPeoplemagazine dedicated to the upcoming wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Maybe it was the word “princess” that captured Ursula’s attention—that, along with Diana’s beauty. When Eleanor explained what the story was about, Ursula begged her to buy the magazine, which she carried around with her and took to bed, to study the pictures. On the morning of the royal wedding in London—a July day when the temperature hovered around ninety—she had sat on the living room floor, eyes glued to the television set. She wanted to know how a person got to be a princess, and if she could be one, too.
Even very young, Alison had acquired her sharp, witheringly honest way of addressing her sister, and everyone else in the family.
“Nope,” she told Ursula. “You’d have to be rich. Your parents have to live in some fancy house. Forget about it.”
But Ursula didn’t. She wanted to know who the other princes were that hadn’t found wives yet. She was particularly interested in Diana’s tiara, and the coach she and Prince Charles rode off in after the ceremony was over.
After, she always kept a picture of Princess Diana taped to her wall. As time passed and the story unfolded, she added others, until there was a whole collage that included Prince William and Prince Harry and her favorite, of Princess Diana dancing with John Travolta. When Eleanor explained that Prince William would probably be the king someday, she decided to marry him.
“I already explained to you,” Alison told her. “It’s hopeless.” But Ursula was an incorrigible optimist.
“Party pooper,” she told her sister.
Cleaning up Ursula’s room one day—vacuuming around her Barbie hospital, the papier-mâché puppet of Madonna—Eleanor found herself studying her daughter’s wall of tacked-up Princess Diana photographs. Those beautiful gowns, all those exotic trips with Prince Charles, the pictures of Diana and her sons. Whatever was difficult or possibly crazy about having three children so close together in age, Eleanor always knew this: there was nowhere she’d rather be, nothing she’d rather be doing with her life. On the rare occasions when her hands were free, and there were no more diapers to wash or laundry to fold, Eleanor set her magical red-headed baby on his blanket and took out her sketchbook, trying to capture it all. Not that she ever succeeded. Still, there was a quality to the drawings she made at this time in their lives that had not revealed itself in anything she’d made before, a kind of tenderness.
There was something else, too. She could feel how quickly time was passing, how fast her children were growing, and though every stage that disappeared signaled the arrival of another (crawling, to walking, to jumping, to skipping), she felt the changes with a twinge of loss. Eleanor remembered how she had felt when Toby lost interest in nursing (and she knew by then that he was the last). She had registered the moment as a small death.
No more babies. A chapter had closed. That wonderful stretch of months when all this particular child needed was right there in her own body, and all she had to do was unbutton her blouse to provide it, was over. She could begin to reclaim her body, maybe. Allow herself thoughts and ideas that weren’t centered on those three small people who had occupied her every waking moment for the last few years. Maybe ideas for books and pictures would begin to come to her again. Her stalled career might revive, if she was lucky. She and Cam would reclaim their bed for lovemaking, or uninterrupted sleep. But every springtime after that when they stood at the side of the brook, launching their boats, it would occur to her that she was one year closer to the day her son and daughters would no longer live with her and Cam. How would she ever bear that?
Years later, looking back on those days, Eleanor would try to pinpoint when it had started—the slow, relentless leak of passion fromher marriage, so gradual you’d barely notice any change, and Cam’s regretful resignation as he began to drift away from her, like one of the boats they made for their cork people every March, floating dreamily down the brook. It had taken place so gradually that maybe neither of them noticed until somewhere along the line she’d looked up and he was gone.
“Jesus, what’s happened to us?” Cam said one night, as the two of them sat across a table from each other at the pub in town, having a steak dinner. “I’m sitting here with my wife, and it’s the first time we’ve actually been alone together in—what? Four months? Maybe six? And we’re talking about whether we need to put tubes in Ursula’s ears because of all the damned infections, and if we can afford to buy Alison a bike.”
