That winter was the coldest since the year of Al’s birth. She was in third grade now. Ursula, second. Every morning a small, ten-seat bus pulled up at the end of their road—different from the one the girls took—to bring Toby to his special classes. All those days, back before the accident, he’d watched his sisters head out to school on the big yellow bus, asking why he had to stay home. Now finally he was getting on a bus, too. Just not the one they’d planned on.
She’d researched schools for children with Toby’s kind of brain injury, and this one seemed like the best place within driving range.But even Eleanor would have admitted that it was the time Toby spent with Cam, doing their yoga together, riding the tricycle Cam had got him on the bike path, and out in the woodshop, making birdhouses together—Cam cutting the wood, Toby sitting at the bench next to him, handing him a nail now and then—that probably accounted for much of Toby’s progress.
He could speak in short, simple sentences now—I want chips. Big truck come. Go home now—though there was a lack of intonation to his voice, a flatness. He didn’t dance or run the way he used to, but he no longer got down on all fours to climb the stairs as he had done in the first months after the accident. He had a funny, flat-footed gait and his body tilted as he walked. One time, when Eleanor had brought him with her to the girls’ spring concert, a boy in Ursula’s class had pointed to him and laughed. “Look, it’s a zombie,” he said.
Everyone started laughing.
“My brother just has a problem with his brain,” Ursula told them. “You know what your problem is? Your heart.”
The next week, when it was Ursula’s time to give a report in school, she chose Toby for her topic.
“My brother used to be really smart,” she told the class. “Then he fell in a pond. Maybe someday the doctors will figure out how to make his brain work better. In the meantime, he’s still him inside.
“The thing you love isn’t the person’s brain,” she said. “It’s the person.”
46.
Nothing Matters Anymore
For the first weeks after Toby’s accident, recognizing what Eleanor was going through, the newspaper syndicate ran old strips fromFamily Treein place of any new material. After a month had passed, she got back to work, but her mind felt as blank as Toby’s now appeared to be. She still filed the strip every Monday, but the story lines she came up with now had a forced quality to them, like episodes of some old sitcom she might have watched growing up.
One thing about the strip: Eleanor had always managed, within the structure of those five frames, to resolve the family stories she told, in pictures and dialogue, with some kind of hopefulness. But the story they were living now offered no humor, and no happy resolution.
She told herself she had to keep it going. This was their main source of income. Only she couldn’t. The whole point had been telling honest stories about the life of a family, but the story that defined their lives now was the one she could never bring herself to tell. The beloved character of Jasper wasn’t Jasper anymore.
At this pointFamily Treewas running in almost a hundred newspapers across the country. The strip paid their family’s bills, but what had gratified Eleanor just as much was the way a community had grown up around thecharacters. Every week since it started appearing—more and more, as readership expanded—she’d open their mailbox to find it stuffed with letters from readers telling her how much her stories meant to them, how grateful they were that someone was talking about the kinds of things going on in the family she drew that nobody else talked about. Mostly, these letters came from women around Eleanor’s age, raising families of their own and navigating their own complicated relationships, but others wrote toher, too, telling her how much the strip meant to them. She heard from a woman in her nineties who said, “You really bring me back to my own young days,” and from a young woman who wrote to say that it was reading Eleanor’s strip, week after week, that made her feel she wanted children.
“Who would think that a few simple drawings could tell a whole story?” she wrote. “But there’s always so much going on in those pictures you draw.”
“I had this idea that if I wanted to be a successful woman in the world, I had to set aside the idea of having a family,” one reader wrote. “You make me feel that it might be possible to have both. Not easy, but possible.”
There was a man in prison who wrote to her every few months. “I haven’t seen my own wife and kids in five years,” he wrote. “When I open up the paper and see the pictures you draw about Maggie and Bo and their kids, I like to pretend it’s my family. That dad, Bo, is me.”
For a while after Toby’s accident she just left Jasper out of the strip, but people started sending letters asking what happened to him. Some of them were actually worried. Correctly, of course. She decided to bring him back.
After a dozen false starts, Eleanor finally managed to create a single frame. It was a picture of Jasper staring out the window, his eyes totally blank. Behind him stood his mother, Maggie. Eleanor herself couldn’t have said how it was she’d accomplished this, but she had somehow managed, with a few strokes of her pen, to convey, on the mother’s face, a look of utter and irredeemable devastation.
On the fifth day of having nothing further to show for her hours at her drawing table out in the studio, Eleanor called her editor at the syndicate.
“The strip is finished,” she said. It used to be her joke, callingFamily Tree“a non-comic.” Now this was real. “Until I can find someone in the market for a tragic strip,” she told Darla, “I’m going to have to find another line of work.”
“What are you going to do about money?” Darla asked. Even before Cam—who would not have expressed any particular concernone way or the other—it was Darla with whom she shared her decision to endFamily Tree.
“It doesn’t matter,” Eleanor said. It felt as though nothing did anymore.
She went back to her old freelancing—picking up one-shot jobs drawing logos. She called the textbook company she’d worked for, before the strip got picked up by the syndicate, to say she was ready to take on work again.
“I don’t get it,” her old boss at the textbook company told her. “I thought you hit the big time. I can’t compete with the kind of money you must have been making with the syndicate.”
“Never mind that,” Eleanor told her. She had no desire to go into her reasons.
47.
Shavasana
There was never this moment when Cam announced he was abandoning his woodshop. He had just stopped going out there. What was the point of creating one more burl bowl, when the shelves of his shop were filled with them—beautiful, but unsold?
Cam spent his days with Toby now—working him through the physical therapy exercises that never seemed to make a discernible difference in his motor skills, turning the pages of theirBaby’s First Hundred Wordsbook.
