“Dad took care of it,” Al said. They had buried Sally’s body under the ash tree.
“I would have wanted to be there,” she told her daughter. She had loved Sally, too.
“You don’t live there anymore,” Al said. “You moved, remember?”
The terms of Eleanor and Cam’s divorce specified shared custody, the children to spend weekends and school vacations in Akersville,along with most of the summer. The farm was the place where the children could play outside on their own and be with their new dog, camp out in the tree fort, swim in the pond.
The pond. Eleanor didn’t want to look at it, but the children still played there, catching frogs and swimming out to the raft. Even Toby. Toby most of all, probably, because he remembered nothing of the awful day. All he knew was that he loved splashing in the water, and that there was no place on earth he loved more than the farm where he’d been born. That was how all of them felt about the place. Including the person who no longer lived there.
The document that Eleanor and Cam had signed, drawn up by their lawyers, carried the stipulation that Cam would buy out Eleanor’s half of the property when Alison turned eighteen. Doing that—against the advice of her attorney—had been Eleanor’s way to postpone an awful moment. They had a ways to go yet before Al’s eighteenth birthday, but the question hung in the air. What was going to happen when they reached the date for the buyout?
Cam had no money, and no likely prospect of saving up any. The only logical alternative Eleanor’s attorney had presented: putting the property up for sale.
It was an awful thought, even to Eleanor—to Eleanor as much as any of them, probably. She had loved that property before any of them. Three long winters, she’d lived there on her own.
“You’re going to need that money,” the attorney had told her, back when they’d worked out the divorce agreement. “A single parent making a living the way you do can’t afford to walk away from her most significant asset. Wait till you see what it’s like when you start paying for college. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from all appearances, you’re the one who’ll be footing the bill.”
Maybe, at the time they drew up the divorce decree, Eleanor had allowed herself to believe that someday Cam would earn the money to pay her for her share of the farm, but if so she’d been dreaming. From the poster she’d seen up at the health food store, Eleanor gathered that Coco was teaching yoga at the farm part-time now. Cam was still working on his physical therapy license, and doing massage therapy on the side. But it was impossible to imagine that even withtheir combined incomes, he and Coco could come up with a lump sum sufficient to buy her out.
In Eleanor’s life, too, money no longer flowed in as it once had. There were fewer jobs from her editor at the textbook company these days, and the royalties from sales of her Bodie series had largely dried up. She still took freelance jobs when they came her way, but when money was really tight, she picked up work as a substitute teacher in the Brookline school district.
She sent out a proposal to her old editor at Applewood Press. A few weeks later, a letter arrived, informing her that her editor had retired three years earlier. Nobody there knew her anymore. The form letter they sent thanked her for her interest. They were not considering queries at this time.
An idea came to her. That weekend, when the children were at Cam’s, Eleanor set herself up at her desk with her drawing pencils and a stack of white paper. She spent two solid days making greeting cards. By Sunday afternoon, when it was time to pick up her children, she had created over a dozen. Monday morning, she mailed them to the Sweetheart company in Indianapolis.
Two months passed with no money coming in. Eleanor made stacks of bills now: the ones she had to pay, the ones she could put off. Somewhere along the line, Cam’s parents had discontinued paying for the tutoring, and Eleanor cut Toby’s sessions back.
Now his tutor called her in for a conference. For Toby to make progress, he needed more than two sessions a week, she told Eleanor.
That afternoon a call came from Indianapolis, the greeting card company. The creative director liked her submissions. Of the fourteen designs she’d sent them, they were buying eight. “That’s highly unusual, by the way,” he told her. “All of us here think you’ve got a great future in greeting card design.”
Ten days later a check arrived with enough to pay for Toby’s tutoring and cover the next two months of rent on their condo. She sent off over a dozen more greeting card designs the following month and sold every one—three for birthdays, five for anniversaries, one for bereavement, and one each for Father’s and Mother’s Day.
For some reason ideas for Mother’s Day cards did not come as easily to Eleanor as the cards for birthdays and anniversaries did, the condolence cards, the thank-yous and Easter blessings. Eleanor had a hard time coming up with pictures and snappy lines about the bond between a mother and her children. She had too much to say about that one, too much feeling to put into a greeting card.
Maybe loving her children too much was her downfall—the weight it placed on the three of them, knowing that for their mother they represented everything of greatest meaning in her life. No question their father loved them, too, but without the heavy sense of obligation her devotion seemed to carry with it. Cam’s sense of well-being did not reside, as hers did, in how the children were feeling that day. (Three children! Exposure to heartbreak, tripled!) If they were having problems, as surely they would, he would not suffer their pain in the way Eleanor did.
Young as they were, the children must have sensed this in their mother, and it seemed to leave them with a certain brittle edge of protectiveness where she was concerned. It was enough for a person to be responsible for his own happiness. No child wanted to be responsible for his mother’s happiness, too.
She kept it together most of the time, but she knew this, and so did her children: when you tried too hard all the time, and worried all the time about making things perfect for your children, every so often you reached the breaking point.
Eleanor recognized all of this without being able to change any of it. There was always that territory of Crazyland out there, just over the border, where she might find herself at any moment if she wasn’t careful. Always, just around the bend in the river, rapids to pull her down.
66.
A New Human Being
The first thing Eleanor had loved about Cam—more even than his handsome face and the bright red curls encircling it—was how he loved babies. The words he’d said to her the night they met: “I want to make babies with you.” Not “have” but “make.” Choosing to have a child represented an act of construction, embarking on a shared work of art.
“A cheap thrill,” he called their children. For him, maybe, that had been true.
“I can’t believe it’s possible for two people to get together and come up with something as great as this,” he’d said, a few days after Alison’s birth. “It’s like the best-kept secret, having a kid.”
Not such a secret, exactly, Eleanor had pointed out to him. Plenty of people throughout history had figured this out before they did.
“I’m not talking about sex or reproduction,” he said. “I mean, getting to be parents. Having this baby show up, that the two of us made by ourselves, without hiring any experts or going anyplace or spending anything besides a few bucks for the prenatal vitamins.” (Well, they didn’t justshow up,she might have said to him. Anyone who described it that way had probably never experienced childbirth.)
Back at art school, Cam said, everyone used to talk about heading to New York City, getting gallery representation, having a show. It struck him as ironic—some kind of big cosmic joke—that all this time, they had this amazing capacity inside their own bodies to create something so much more important than any sculpture they’d build, or anything they’d ever put on a piece of canvas. A new human being.
