“A lot of shit starts coming down, once people that used to loveeach other don’t anymore,” Darla said. “They start rewriting their history. I probably do that myself. There must have been a time when I actually loved Bobby, but I can’t even remember why anymore.”
“Our children love us both,” Eleanor said. “That won’t ever change.”
55.
A New Mattress
Long before this, in the aftermath of a different hard time in her life, Eleanor had set out to buy a house. Two weeks after Cam told her he was in love with Coco, she set out again in search of a home, though this time she’d be a renter.
Once, this would have seemed unimaginable for a person who loved swimming or skating in their pond and growing tomatoes and looking at the stars, but that was before. Now she headed south to Boston—a place to which she would have said once she’d never return. Close enough that the children could go back and forth. Far enough away that she might manage to start fresh.
She figured she’d find a condominium. Simpler than a house. Easier upkeep. Cheaper. The first three she looked at were no good; Eleanor recognized this the moment she walked in the door. But the fourth was perfect—recent construction, a little bland, but with a tiny yard and enough space that each of the children could have their own room. The kitchen was small, but the children could do their homework there while Eleanor made dinner, with space for a couch where they could watch movies. There was a sunny dining room where she’d put a big table where they could lay out their valentine-making supplies every February and a bay window for the Christmas tree.
She wasn’t going to love this condo the way she had loved their farm, but she didn’t need to. And in certain ways—particularly those having to do with the children—this place offered advantages to life on the farm. At the special school Toby had attended near Akersville, children with totally different kinds of disabilities were placed in the same too-small classroom. Where they’d be living now, there was a school whose entire focus was on children with brain injurieslike Toby’s. A bus would pick him up every morning and bring him there.
The plan was for the children to stay put until the end of the school year. Eleanor would come to see them on weekends. The rest of the time she’d get the new place set up for them to move in when summer vacation started. That way, by the following September, they’d be accustomed to their new home.
The girls would have to change schools, naturally, but they’d have better teachers, more opportunities. Where they’d be moving, they could walk by themselves to the library. There was no pond, of course, but there was a big public pool and in winter, an outdoor skating rink and a much more competitive basketball team for Al. Eleanor would get a family membership at the Museum of Science.
These were all the aspects of the move Eleanor pitched to Al and Ursula (less so to Toby, though he was there in the car when she laid it all out).
“Your friends can come over without their parents driving them,” she said.
“What friends?” Al said. “We don’t know anybody in Brookline.”
Eleanor didn’t kid herself. None of the attractions of city life she suggested replaced what they were losing, and the children all knew it. Who their mother had been in their lives, until now, was the person Al, Ursula, and Toby had counted on to fix things. Who she was now was the person who broke them.
About the particulars—the requirement, far into the future, that their father buy out Eleanor’s share of the farm they shared—she said nothing. The main thing was that the children would still have the farm in their lives. They’d go there on weekends. Even though she would no longer be there herself, Eleanor knew this was a good thing.
The owners of the condo Eleanor chose to rent had moved to Florida to be near their grandchildren, and the place was available for as long as she wanted. The first week of March (cork people season, but not this year), she rented a U-Haul truck. Walt helped, but there was surprisingly little to be done in the end. Eleanor didn’t want to dismantle her children’s home, and she didn’t want much of theold stuff anyway. Mostly, she assembled the furnishings she needed from secondhand stores and a bunch of things the former owners didn’t want to bring south with them.
She bought a new drawing table—a smaller one—and turned a small storage room into her studio and plugged in her Mac. Pulling her car in the driveway of the condo, she did not say, “I’m home.”
A few days after the move, Eleanor drove back to their farm one more time to pick up the last couple of boxes (a few clothes, her cookbooks, a couple of muffin tins) that hadn’t fit in the U-Haul. It was late morning, a Tuesday, all three children in school. Cam was out in the yard bucking firewood.
“Those look heavy,” he said. “I’ll give you a hand.”
He followed her into the house. In the kitchen, she took in the sight of a pan of homemade Rice Krispies treats on the counter (not part of her repertoire or, in the past, her children’s, and Phyllis was not a baker). An unfamiliar pair of women’s skates hung by the woodstove.
“Coco’s been here,” she said.
“She was home from school on a break. The kids wanted to see her.”
His voice was flat, revealing nothing.
The full moon. Black ice. The sound of cracking beneath her skate blades.
She had left the box of clothes in the closet. To reach it meant passing through their old bedroom.
“I’ll just be a second.”
All those years, through the births of three children and a thousand times they’d made love on this bed (every day, at first, then less)—the nights in which one or another of their children, and usually all three, had ended up there next to them—they’d always meant to get a real mattress but never did. All those years, they had slept on the futon from Cam’s cabin, back in his Vermont days.
There was a new mattress in their old bedroom. A good one, from the looks of it.
Eleanor stood at the side that had been hers, looking out the window. From this spot, when in the late stages of labor with theirdaughters—and, that last time, with their son—she had looked out to the branches of the old ash tree, reaching leafless across a winter sky. There was a spot on the ceiling she’d focused on during contractions, where, when she’d first moved into this house, before she and Cam got together, she’d stuck a single glow-in-the-dark star.
It was still there.
