“She’s upstairs,” Eleanor said. “She said she wants to be alone.”
“Where’s my future astronaut?” he called up the stairs. “Come down and give your dad a hug.”
“I saw you with your girlfriend at Hopewell Falls,” Eleanor told him, as he reached for a beer. Off in his truck all day away from the news, though not alone, he was thirsty. “Also, Christa McAuliffe is dead.”
That night, after she tucked the girls in—Eleanor alone this time, though it was Cam who got Toby in his pajamas and settled him on his mattress in the borning room—Eleanor fixed a pot of tea and the two of them sat at the kitchen table. They waited until they were sure that everyone was asleep and kept their voices low, knowing how sound carried to the upstairs bedrooms. Cam’s face, as he looked across the table at Eleanor, bore an expression she could not remember having seen before. She would have preferred despair, but what he offered looked more like eerily calm regret, and pity.
“We didn’t mean for this to happen,” he told Eleanor.
We.A new configuration, in which her husband had aligned himself with their babysitter. Years ago—when she was not much older than Alison, now—Coco had shown up in their kitchen with a loaf of banana bread to mark the birth of Cam and Eleanor’s first child. Back in the fall, Eleanor and Ursula had baked a carrot cake to celebrate her eighteenth birthday.
Cam took a sip of his tea, rubbed his fine chin. His eyes, looking into hers, offered no excuses. This was supposed to be the moment when he’d put his arms around her and say, “What was I thinking? You’re the woman I want.”
“You know as well as I do that things between us have been badfor a long time now,” Cam told Eleanor. She did know this, now that he mentioned it. Since that morning just over seven months ago when she’d knelt at the edge of their pond over the lifeless body of their son, she had not been able to forgive her husband. In many ways she’d left their marriage that day. Now he was the one departing from it.
“This isn’t just about the accident,” he said. “It’s been a long time since we were in a good place together.”
Eleanor studied his boot. Remembered, crazily, a night they danced the polka together in the Akersville town hall, the night they’d skated under a full moon as the ice below their feet made those weird, groaning sounds.Expand. Contract. Expand.She remembered a night, not so long ago—after Toby’s accident—when he’d reached for her in the dark, and she had said, “Oh, God, not now.”
“I have no desire for that anymore,” she’d told him. “I don’t know if I ever will, ever again.”
“If there was anything I could do to fix it, I would,” he told her. (And he had, actually. Tried. Yoga class at the Y. The plaster in their bedroom. Milk paint.)
Why was it a surprise that he had chosen to look for someone else—or that when such a person presented herself to him, as she had all those afternoons in their field, playing soccer, he would have leapt at the opportunity?
In Eleanor’s eyes, Cam would always be the man who had left their son to wander alone into the pond that day. To Coco, Cam was still the handsome artist-hero she had loved since she was cartwheeling around the edges of the softball field, a man who could make bowls out of burls and forts out of refrigerator boxes and ice castles out of snow—a man who could make the most amazing catches on the softball field and kick a soccer ball farther than anybody. Who wouldn’t choose to be with a young girl who could see you as a hero, over the one who had witnessed the moment of your greatest failure and never let you forget it?
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m in love with Coco. I know how you see me, but I’m not that guy. I just don’t want to be married to you anymore.”
51.
A Marriage Not Long Enough to Bear Peaches
After, when she could bring herself to think about those years (as, for a long time, she could not), Eleanor named the days when her children were little—she and Cam consumed by their care and raising, no doubt to the detriment of their marriage—as the happiest she had known. Later she would look back and realize how brief that stretch of time had been, that constituted the sum total of her marriage to her children’s father, before everything fell away. It had been a handful of seasons, when you got down to counting—not even enough of them that they’d buried a dog together or seen their peach tree bear fruit. Thunderstorms on the porch, picnics in the field, science fair projects and art projects and trips to the ocean, snow days and sick days and summer evenings at softball games, winter mornings of pancakes with Reddi-wip squirted on top (Cam’s idea, of course), shoveling out the car, trips to the dump, uneasy visits from the grandparents, times their checking account went overdrawn and other times—fewer of these—when some unexpected royalty check had shown up, and the two of them went out for dinner and looked into each other’s eyes.
Did they hold hands across the table then? When they got home and paid the babysitter—the babysitter, there was a story—did they make love? Did they still love each other, or were they just too distracted by everything else to even ask the question, too consumed with everything else to even consider the question, were they happy?
Later, she would wonder if maybe it was never that good in the first place. Maybe all that time, she’d been kidding herself. When you looked closer, maybe trouble was always there, lurking under the sweet pictures of their lives together. Maybe trouble was alwayseverywhere, and what mattered was what you did about it. Some people hung on and kept bobbing down the stream. Some went overboard.
Later, when Alison began turning away from her—Alison and then Ursula, never Toby, thank God—Eleanor wondered if any of it had been real, after all. Maybe she’d been a bad mother, without even knowing it. Maybe nothing she’d once believed was true.
Scenes came back to her in the night. Not of the good times, but of others.
She’d found an old piece of hamburger meat in the back of the refrigerator one time, left so long that when she took it out it turned out to be teeming with maggots. This was the picture that came to her now.
Milk gone sour. The blood in Matt Hallinan’s car. The sound of the abortion doctor’s voice, coming from the machine in his neck. Mr. Guttenberg, standing in her dorm room.There’s been an accident.
She was back in Crazyland now. The room was spinning. Everything wrong that ever happened, that she had chosen not to consider, swirled around her like whiteout conditions in a blizzard, so bad you can’t see the road five feet in front of you anymore, and the only thing for it is to pull over, only maybe you can’t.
She was gunning the engine. The hunt for the Barbie shoe, thebûche de Noël,but ten times worse.
She thought about the time her station wagon had broken down on a muddy road with four children in the back (hers, and Toby’s friend Jack) and she had knocked on someone’s door in town to call Cam, only he didn’t pick up, and when she’d finally made it home with them all, on foot, it turned out he was playing the Talking Heads so loud he hadn’t heard.
“You have to hear this song,” he said, as she walked in the door. He didn’t even say anything, just started playing “Creatures of Love.”
She had just looked at him.
There was the time when she thought she was pregnant again, and they knew they couldn’t afford it, and she had stayed up all nightcrying. They were still trying to figure out what to do when she had the miscarriage—blood all over the kitchen floor, as she was mopping it. They had sat up together most of that night, holding each other. “I guess we really wanted that baby after all,” he’d said.
