She remembered the first night they spent together, when she’d tried to count the freckles on Cam’s chest, but gave up. His pale naked skin in the candlelight seemingly lit from within.
A winter night. The sound of a basketball game coming from the other room, oranges tumbling off the bed, the world, or just her body, ripping in two.
We have a daughter.
Sixteen months later:We have another daughter.She had loved it that he registered no trace of disappointment at the news. He was not one of those men who required a son.
And one more time, another baby. The picture came to her of the moment, in the bathtub this time, when Toby burst into the world—Toby, the one of their children born so fast they had cut the cord and wrapped him in blankets before the midwife made it down their road. Before they even knew the sex of this baby, Cam had called out, “This one’s a redhead.” Those damp curls. Fists, punching the air.A boy.They had told themselves they didn’t care about the sex, but when they saw, Cam said the words, over and over, “I don’t believe it. We have a son.”
She remembered the pronouns.We have a daughter. We have a son.We.This part—the part where he’d speak of the two of them as a single unit—would change. Had already.
There had always been a quilt on this bed. Double wedding ring, stitched by Cam’s grandmother. But today there were only sheets.
She stood there looking out the window at the familiar view. The tree, the field below it. The stone wall. The pond she would give anything to have never built. She didn’t hear Cam enter the room.
“I was stripping the bed,” he said. So many phrases took on new meaning now.
She looked up to see her husband—she had not stopped thinking of him that way yet—standing beside her. He touched her arm.
Later, driving back to her new home in the unfamiliar town where she slept now, she tried to reconstruct the event that had taken place at the house with Cam that afternoon. He must have put his arms around her, but that embrace had nothing to do with lust or longing. The way he touched her was more of an acknowledgment of shared grief, like the comfort one person offers another when there’s been a death in the family.
Cam had wrapped his arms around her. She didn’t so much return the embrace as she collapsed against his body. If he hadn’t caught her she might have dropped to the floor.
He was the only other person on earth who remembered everything that had happened in this house. How could it be that a person could be both the source of your greatest sorrow and the source of your only comfort, all at once? That afternoon he was both.
Neither of them said anything. He pulled his shirt over his head—the same way he’d done all those years back in his Vermont cabin that night, the first one. She unbuttoned her blouse, let her tired, well-nursed breasts fall free, not even caring anymore what they looked like in the daylight because he already knew, and anyway, no further need existed to be what she was not, to him: an object of desire. The day would come when they’d be strangers, but this hadn’t happened yet. Who each of them was that day, to the other, was the only other person on earth who understood what had been lost.
They unzipped their jeans and stepped out of them, let their clothes fall to the floor and faced each other, less like a man and a woman than two parts of the same whole, two halves of a marriage coming apart. Unlike that first time, there was no shred of illusion on his part or hers that what was happening here held any promise for the future. They were honoring their shared past, was all. In an odd way, she believed she was paying homage to their children. The place they came from, where they began.
“I think we should have lots of babies together,” he’d told her once.“I want to make a family.” Well, they had done that. Now came the unmaking part.
She knew his body as well as her own. He could have said the same of hers. She knew where the birthmark was that he used to call North Dakota. He knew where the stretch marks were from that first pregnancy, and the two that followed.
“We both get to be the parents of this child,” she’d said. “But my body is wrecked. And you look like some marble statue at the Metropolitan Museum.”
“You’re beautiful to me,” he’d told her. At the time she believed him. At the time he probably meant it.
His body had barely changed since the day they met. One look at Eleanor’s and you would have known this was a woman who’d given birth. Now he was in love with a skinny girl with small perfect breasts and a flat stomach and legs that went on forever—a girl who believed he hung the moon.
A memory came to her.
They were in Maine, on a family trip on which Coco, twelve years old at the time, had accompanied them—to help entertain the children and make it possible for Eleanor and Cam to go out alone for a lobster dinner and a glass of wine now and then. At a rest stop on the highway, heading to Acadia National Park, Coco had gotten her period for the first time. She’d taken Eleanor aside, embarrassed to have gotten blood on her shorts. “Don’t worry,” Eleanor said.
She’d taken Coco to the ladies’ room. The two of them shared a stall, Eleanor squatting beside Coco as she sat on the toilet, teaching her how to insert a tampon.
Eleanor’s lovemaking with Cam that final afternoon had not lasted particularly long. Nothing happened that stood out as different in any way from a hundred other times their bodies had come together in this way, except for the knowledge that they were saying goodbye. They would never be in this place together again. They held each other but did not kiss.
After she’d put her clothes on again, she picked up the box she had set down before—the one with her cookbooks, which she wouldseldom if ever use again.The Tassajara Bread Book.(Homemade sourdough slathered in butter that they fed each other by the fire, naked.) Julia Child,Mastering the Art of French Cooking.(Consulted one time only, the night Patty came to dinner. Coquilles St.-Jacques. Chocolate mousse.)The Silver Palate. (Chicken Marbella, for years, her standby when her in-laws came to visit.) So many ways to mark the passage of time in a marriage, the seasons of love.
Neither of them said anything as she walked out the door, after.
Where would you begin? Where would you end?
56.
I Will Always Love You
Sometimes, waking up alone in the new condo, she would forget where she was, reach for a door that would have been there if she were back in their old bedroom, or—not yet familiar with the layout here—find herself bumping into a wall she hadn’t expected.
