It lasted several minutes. When he was done, his body went limp. Eleanor picked him up and carried him to bed.
“It’s going to be okay, Toby. I promise. We’ll all still love each other.”
He said the same four words, over and over. The same ones Eleanor herself, though in possession of a vastly greater vocabulary, felt like speaking herself.
I want my family.
Later, she would always connect the end of her marriage with theChallengerexplosion. As with that one, there had been warnings. That faulty O-ring. Nobody paid attention, was all.
One difference Eleanor had always recognized between herself and Cam: he had an amazing capacity to sail through life, even in difficult times, or awful ones. There was an ease about him, with which he shed old sorrow, always with the assumption that some new joy would replace it. Cam didn’t suffer injury or grief or anxiety as Eleanor did. He would not have spent a moment worrying over the loss of a Barbie shoe, and he seemed equally adept at sidestepping worries over a girl who bullied Toby on the playground, the looming specter of a tax bill they didn’t have the money to pay, letters from Alison’s teacher telling them that Alison—Al—appeared depressed.
“Maybe we should take her to a counselor?” Eleanor said.
“Or take her out for an ice cream cone,” he’d answered, grinning.
Sometimes Cam’s refusal to saddle himself with sadness or worry seemed like a gift, and a trait Eleanor wished she could emulate. Sometimes it left her feeling as though the weight of the world sat on her shoulders alone. Maybe the same thing that made him so enviably carefree also resulted in his maddening obliviousness. Life just didn’t seem so earthshakingly serious to Cam.
He wasn’t nostalgic about their past. “Why do I need to look back?” he said. “We’re in the present.” Old history, old injuries, pain, losses—they never stayed with him. Where everything that ever happened to Eleanor—her lonely childhood, her parents’ accident, that summer in Matt Hallinan’s car, and all the summers after, and all the other seasons—all that remained alive for Eleanor. Eleanor remembered everything and never let it go.
It was the gift, or curse, she brought to her artwork, too. She remembered perfectly that moment when the police car had appeared in the driveway with Charlie’s body lashed to the top. The pictureremained clear enough that had she chosen to, she could have drawn it. She could still hear the sound of Mr. Guttenberg’s voice on the other side of the door the night he came to her dormitory room to tell her about the crash.
Most of all, the image she could never get out of her brain was of her son, facedown in the pond. And Cam, who was supposed to be watching, running down the hill.
It was that moment, and a thousand smaller ones leading up to it, that had hardened her heart. She might tell Darla that it was the affair with Coco that ended her marriage to Cam, but Eleanor knew it wasn’t, really. Cam’s falling in love with someone else was the symptom, not the cause. In Eleanor’s eyes, Cam would always be the one responsible for the worst thing that ever happened in their lives. What ended her marriage was her inability to forgive him for that.
It didn’t matter how many times he told her how sorry he was and how determined to become a better person, or that he—the same man who had once asked where they kept the diapers—had dedicated himself to the full-time job of overseeing Toby’s rehabilitation. It was still hard for Eleanor, just looking at his face—a fact noted by Ursula, who observed one day, at breakfast, “Mom, why do you always look in a different direction when Dad’s talking to you?”
Ursula never missed anything.
53.
Beyond Valentines
Valentine’s Day came and went, without the usual whirl of craft projects and strawberry desserts. Only Ursula followed through in delivering cards that year, and only to her parents. “Love!,” she wrote, in letters so big they barely fit on the paper. Less a celebration than a plea.
Cam and Eleanor still lived under the same roof, but barely spoke to each other now. If Cam bumped into Eleanor, passing in the kitchen, he said, “Excuse me.” Eleanor, seeing him walk in the door now, as she stood at the sink, stepped away to another room. It was as if just breathing the same air hurt.
Someone was leaving. Someone was staying. The situation was clearly terminal. They were standing around waiting for the last breath of their marriage. They were beyond valentines.
After the discovery of Cam’s affair, and his announcement that he didn’t love her anymore, Eleanor might have told him to move out. She would have had legal grounds for that. Moral ones, anyway.
But that would have meant staying on in a place where every room offered reminders of the life they didn’t have anymore. More than any place on earth, this was the one that had represented her safe harbor. Since the days of their children’s births she had pictured them getting married here someday, grandchildren running through the field. Someday, far from now, she had imagined her ashes and Cam’s scattered under the great tree. But the idea of staying alone with the children, in the house where they had been born, overlooking the field where two parents no longer married to each other had spoken their vows, seemed impossibly sad.
She had made her home on this farm. She could not imagine ahome she would ever love as much as she had loved this one, and because this was true, it hardly mattered where she located herself next, except that it had to be somewhere her children could feel safe. She had found something she’d never known before, living on this dead-end road with the father of her children—a sense of home. But she saw no way of staying on here now, when every room—and the field beyond, and the vegetable garden, and the studio, and the pond (that, most of all)—triggered memories of the life she didn’t have anymore.
She remembered as clearly as if it had been yesterday that first afternoon she saw the house with the old Realtor, Ed. The wide-board floors. The beam where, every Fourth of July, a few generations of Murchisons had penciled in the heights of their children and fired off the miniature cannon afterward. The little knoll at the foot of the field where Cam and Eleanor and their children had planted a row of firs to serve as their Christmas trees for the next thirty years.
This year, same as always, they’d tromped through the snow together to chop down their tree and put it up, as always, in the corner opposite the fireplace. She had chosen her children’s gifts so carefully this past Christmas, as she always did—as if locating a Cabbage Patch doll for Ursula or getting the Commodore 64 for Al would ensure their happiness. (Toby was another story. Toby didn’t care what you gave him anymore.)
Then came the next part: how, with her three children watching, standing frozen among the newly opened presents, the twinkling lights, she had picked up the platter holding the precious cake she’d spent the last three hours constructing and smashed the whole thing into the trash.
So much for protecting your children. So much for ensuring their happiness.
If Cam had been the type to hold on to old injuries, as Eleanor did, he might have blamed her forever for that one, but she was guessing that if you said to him now, “That was pretty awful, what your wife did that time with thebûche de Noël,” he might not even remember.
Eleanor remembered everything, and it was the fact that she did that made her know: she had to leave this place.
Her lawyer told her not to do it. But if she was sure she had to leave the property, he told her, they’d need to hire an appraiser, settle on a figure as to its current market value. Once they had this, they’d know the figure Cam had to come up with to buy her out. Fifty percent of whatever the farm was worth.
