Sometimes Even Breast Milk Isn’t Enough
That was the year Eleanor and Cam built the pond.
They’d been talking about this for years. Every afternoon in warm weather, the five of them walked to the waterfall (four, if Cam was off on his mountain bike or at softball practice), and sometimes they brought their poles to fish downstream, but it wasn’t a place for young children to swim—the water too rough and swirling, the stones too sharp.
A few months before, Eleanor had sold an article to a women’s magazine. It was a story about Alison’s decision, when she was six, to stop answering to any name but Little Joe. She had fallen in love with the character played by Michael Landon onBonanzareruns on Nickelodeon. For her birthday that year, all she wanted was a pair of cowboy boots.
It was a funny story. “Your daughter has some imagination,” one of the softball wives had observed.
Because the money felt like a windfall, Eleanor and Cam used it to hire a backhoe. For ten days straight, Buck Hollingsworth, the Yellow Jackets catcher, had shown up at their place every morning at seven to dig out the pond site.
Alison found the machine too noisy and stayed in her room a lot during this period, working on a scale model of theTitanic,but Ursula and Toby were transfixed by the process. They sat on the grass for hours every day watching Buck work, and when he asked if they’d like to come up in the cab with him and help operate the machine, Toby looked as if the doors of heaven had just opened. Ursula, always the caretaker, yielded her time in the cab of the backhoe so her brother could stay there longer, working the controls with Buck.
After the hole was finished and Buck made his way down the driveway that last day, Toby looked as bereft as if he’d lost his best friend.
In the days that followed, the water began to fill the hole, frogs appeared out of nowhere, and the dirt turned to the most wonderful mud, and for the rest of the summer, all any of them wanted to do was play in it. Even Alison—though she was always quieter and more reserved—slathered the rich dark goop over her legs and arms and face and lay in the sun till it dried. Once the water got deep enough, they all jumped in the beginnings of their pond. Self-conscious about her body, even when very young, Alison kept her swimsuit on, but Ursula and Toby spent much of that summer naked in the mud. Just about the only time they put on clothes was when they all piled into the car to attend one of Cam’s softball games.
Eleanor and Peggy Olin had one of those friendships formed through children. The fact that Peggy’s daughter, Gina, was older than Alison and Ursula, conferred a certain authority. Peggy regularly advised Eleanor on which kindergarten teacher she favored and where to get winter boots at the best price. Other than Bonnie Henderson’s bulletins on her sex life, no deep exchanges occurred on the bleachers at Yellow Jackets games. But for a few summers there, Eleanor regarded Peggy as her closest friend, after Darla.
Then one day—late May, black fly season—Peggy was absent from the bleachers, Bob gone from the field, and one of the other wives told them the news: Peggy and Bob’s daughter Gina—the child raised on brown rice and tofu—had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
The team took up a collection. Someone suggested a bake sale and someone else passed around a card for all the team members and wives to sign. Peggy and Bob were driving to Boston that weekend to consult with a specialist at Dana-Farber. Then they were going to Johns Hopkins. St. Jude’s. Then they were visiting some clinic in Arizona.
By Fourth of July weekend, with no word from Peggy, Eleanor knew she should call. But every time she began dialing their number,the thought of what she might hear about Gina’s condition made her stop.
Here was the awful truth about being a parent. From the moment of your children’s births, you did all these things to protect them. You made your own baby food; you checked to make sure the fabric of their pajamas wasn’t flammable and there was the correct space between the bars of the crib. When, in your second pregnancy, you read about a rare disease contracted from cat feces in a litter box, you got rid of your cat.
You read the books all the experts had written, and you followed their advice. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when one of your children was sick, you stepped quietly into the room where they slept, to listen to their breathing.
And still, there was no protecting them. You could burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom—the image that haunted Eleanor, when she rentedSleeping Beautyfrom the video store—and still, the fair-haired princess in your care could prick her finger and fall into that deep and terrible sleep.
Look at Gina Olin. Breastfed until age four. Bald now, from the chemotherapy.
All that summer, Bob Olin still presided over the outfield, but his daughter’s illness had changed him. He seemed to run after the balls with a kind of manic ferocity absent in previous seasons, as if everything wrong in his life, which was just about everything, might be obliterated if he could just connect his glove with that one line drive coming his way. Men were supposed to protect their families, at all costs. But how was he supposed to protect his child against attack from inside her own body?
Peggy still brought Gina to games sometimes. She was in a wheelchair now, her body thin as a leaf, her eyes glazed. Toby offered her a mozzarella stick one evening, but she just looked at him as if he came from a whole different planet. Or she did. There was a look on her face as if she saw things nobody else did. She was floating high above the ball field. More like a cloud than a person.
Word on the bleachers was that Peggy and Bob had brought theirdaughter to see a healer in Quebec who was said to cure hopeless cases by touching a person’s forehead and placing a drop of a special water on their tongue, but when they got back, Gina was weaker than ever. By August, Peggy must have lost ten pounds. She wore the same clothes every game, and seemed to have given up brushing her hair. They’d discontinued chemotherapy by now, on the advice of the doctors, who’d told the Olins to bring their daughter home and make her as comfortable as possible. Bonnie Henderson told Eleanor that Peggy had approached one of the younger wives on the team, who was due to give birth any minute, about getting a vial of her breast milk for Gina once she delivered, to boost Gina’s immune system. To the women on the bleachers, her quest sounded crazy, but what else could she do? How was a mother supposed to give up trying to save her child’s life?
The others—the ones with healthy children—sat quiet, watching, vowing to never again complain about rowdy four-year-olds or six-year-olds who wouldn’t finish their sandwiches. Eleanor was one of these. Looking at the pale, shrunken form of Gina Olin in her sticker-bedecked wheelchair, with a Cabbage Patch doll propped up in her lap, she made a silent promise to herself that she would ask for nothing, ever again, but that her children stay healthy and safe.
This was the terrible part of being a parent. The more you loved, the more you had to lose. It might as well be your own heart the pitcher was firing off toward the plate, hovering out in midair, ready for some bat to smash into it. Once you had a child you were never safe again.
Gina died that August. When Eleanor told the children, Alison fell silent for a minute, then opened her homework. Ursula flung herself on the couch, weeping. Toby wanted to know where they were going to put her body, and what would happen to her soul.
Later that night, in bed—Toby pressed up against her body on one side, Cam on the other, the sound of their son’s breathing a soothing presence in the darkened room—Eleanor lay awake looking out the window at the moonlight, coming through the branches of Old Ashworthy. Somewhere off in the woods she heard the barking of a dog, and farther away, a howling that sounded like a pack of coyotes.
She pressed her face against Cam’s chest.
“You awake?”
“I am now,” he said.
“Let’s always remember today,” she said. “How much we have. How lucky we are. Having this family. Living here. Being together.”
“Sounds good,” Cam told her. He was only half awake.
“I don’t need one more thing,” she whispered. “Just this.”
