“You’ve got kids. I could love them.”
He was fighting for her. But she believed she saw something else, too. Part of him knew she was right. He was letting go.
“We need to stop.” Until she spoke, she hadn’t planned on saying this. There was a terrible sound to her words, as if the act of speaking them made it true.
She was in the bathtub when she told him. Timmy Pouliot was kneeling on the floor next to her, running a washcloth over her back. When she got up, so did he.
He held the towel out for her, same as he always did. But there was something different about the way he looked at her this time. As she stepped out of the bathtub, he seemed to be memorizing her body.
They made love one more time. She wasn’t sure, but she thought he might be crying. She dressed quickly. She was on the highway ten minutes later. Not that it mattered now, but it occurred to Eleanor, driving away that last time, that she had probably loved this man.
68.
Not Their Half Brother
She carried on as before. A mother of three children did not have the luxury of doing otherwise. What she’d been doing with Timmy Pouliot all those Friday nights was nothing but an escape from her real life. She couldn’t afford that. She told herself it was better, spending her Friday nights getting caught up on the laundry. And anyway, she should focus her attention on her kids. They gave her plenty to worry about.
Since the separation Eleanor had watched a transformation in Al. Back when they’d first moved to Brookline, and Al enrolled in middle school there, she had taken herself to a barbershop in town where she’d had her hair chopped off short as a boy’s and razor-cut around her neck and ears. Something about seeing her older daughter’s tender pink skin, exposed for the first time since she was a baby, felt to Eleanor like a wound as raw as if her own body had suffered it.
This was always her problem, of course. That her children’s sorrows became hers. She felt their pain so deeply, she hardly registered her own. It was funny (but not very) to remember the time she’d once wept over a scratched-off chicken pox scab.
There was a harder part. In the old days—meaning, days Eleanor was with Cam on the farm, when her children were going through something difficult, they’d come to her to talk about it. There had been a time, not so long past, when they had viewed their mother as the one able to fix whatever trouble it was they encountered. Sometimes, as with the death of Christa McAuliffe, there was no fixing possible, but she could comfort them. They looked to her for that.
More and more, they didn’t. Toby might turn to her as he alwaysdid—climb on her lap, ask for a back rub—but she recognized a change in her girls. It was small things, mostly—a certain sharp, critical way Al looked at her across the table when they had dinner, Ursula’s uncharacteristic silences. Much of the time now her daughters treated her with chilling politeness. Eleanor could hear the way they spoke with their father, when he called them up during the week—their easy laughter, their readiness to recount stories they had not mentioned to her. Once, when she had walked through the room in the middle of one of their phone conversations with Cam, Ursula had abruptly fallen silent, as if Eleanor’s very presence in the room constituted an intrusion on something precious and intimate. They had secrets from her. Secrets they shared with Cam.
Most evident to Eleanor were the looks on their faces when her station wagon pulled down the road to drop them off at Cam’s on Friday afternoon. She hadn’t even turned off the ignition before the three of them were opening the car doors, racing toward the house.
“We’re home,” Ursula called out.
Then there was Coco—her belly just beginning to show under her apron—or Cam, opening the door in his brown work jacket and the hat Al had knitted him for his birthday two years ago, that he evidently wore even in the house. Eleanor knew that Ursula probably waited until the four of them were inside to express the full measure of her joy at being reunited with her father. (Coco, too, probably.) But driving away one time, Eleanor could see them all through the window: Cam bending low to hear what Ursula was telling him, Al hugging her bookbag and some CD—punk, for sure—that she wanted to play for her father. Toby, loping over to the spot by the woodstove where their new puppy, Buster, was lying, to scratch his belly and lie down next to him. Coco in the rocking chair by the woodstove, probably. Good spot for a pregnant woman.
They spent Friday night to Sunday afternoon with their father—their father and Coco—but Toby saw Cam on Wednesdays, too, when Cam drove to Boston for Toby’s physical therapy classes. After, they’d attend the restorative yoga class in Cambridge that Toby loved. It would be nine o’clock by the time Cam dropped him off at the house.
“I miss my dad,” Toby said, as he climbed the stairs to bed. “I miss my home.”
The yoga was helping. Or something was. Toby’s motor control had improved dramatically since the two of them had been going to classes and working together, just the two of them, weekends on the farm.
The children never said much about this, but Cam had evidently completed his physical therapy training. Darla had told Eleanor about an ad that appeared in theAkersville Gazettethat spring, announcing that Cam and Coco were opening a joint practice—physical therapy and massage—in what used to be his old woodshop. A friend of Darla’s had consulted with Cam about a back injury and reported that her session with him had been amazing. This was not a surprise to Eleanor. Cam always had a natural, intuitive sense about the workings of the body. What he’d done with Toby in their long afternoons together in the woodshop, going through exercises he’d designed, had done more for their son than anything he had received at his expensive school.
At some point the girls announced they were all vegetarians now. Then vegan, like Cam and Coco. Ursula still liked to bake, but what she produced in the kitchen now, and the snacks she brought home from her weekends at the farm, featured oats and carob and chia seeds. Most recently, when Eleanor had set one of her key lime pies on the table, the girls had told her no thanks. Only Toby still cleaned his plate.
Coco was one of those women (having known her since she was in grade school, it was still hard for Eleanor to think of Coco as a woman) who looked beautiful pregnant. In her own pregnancies, Eleanor’s whole body had been overtaken: her ankles swelled and her face got puffy. Even her fingers had looked fat.
Eleanor laid eyes on Coco for the first time during her pregnancy somewhere around the sixth month—pulling the car up to her old house to bring the children for their summer vacation. She looked like some farm maiden, in from the garden, with an apronful of fresh produce. Or just one perfect watermelon. Her breasts had filled outa little, but from behind you wouldn’t have known she was carrying a baby in that long, slim-hipped body of hers. She looked twenty-two years old, and she was.
It was August the next time Eleanor returned to Akersville. The children had been spending the summer there, which had made it possible for Ursula to perform in a kids’ summer theater production ofOliver!Eleanor was just taking her seat when she spotted the two of them—Cam and Coco—off to one side of the auditorium, talking with a couple she recognized from the softball team, back in the old days—Peggy and Bob Olin, parents of Gina, the pale, strawberry blond child they’d all watched slowly dying over a single long softball summer. Except for the day of Gina’s memorial service, Eleanor hadn’t seen the Olins since. Peggy had disappeared from the bleachers, and not so long after, so had Eleanor.
But here they were now, the four of them, greeting each other like long-lost relatives and appearing to be in deep conversation. Maybe they were discussing their tomato crops, or the pros and cons of synthetic decking. Maybe Bob, a contractor, was offering his thoughts on some home renovation project Cam had embarked on. Or Cam was advising Bob on exercises for his back.
It felt like a hundred years ago that Eleanor sat on the bench next to Peggy at games—a barely pubescent Coco off on the field with the children, blowing bubbles and performing cartwheels—as Peggy held forth about the Adelle Davis diet while Gina and Ursula played in the dirt.
After Gina died, one of the other softball wives said she’d heard Peggy was drinking a lot, and there were rumors of Bob having an affair, but they must have worked things out, because here they were now, come to see their other daughter performing in the show, just as Eleanor was. They were holding hands, even. Eleanor had forgotten about Gina’s big sister. Checking the program, she saw that Katie Olin was playing Oliver.
There was something about the sight of the four of them—Peggy and Bob, Coco and Cam—standing there talking and looking so easy and happy. Eleanor couldn’t take her eyes off of them. Then Peggy took off her sweater. Eleanor watched as Bob lifted it gently from hiswife’s shoulders. Sometimes it was the smallest things, like this one, that caused a stab. It had been so long since anyone had helped her off with her sweater, or anything close.
Timmy Pouliot helping her into the bathtub. But that was over.
With the sweater removed, it was clear: Peggy was pregnant, too—about as far along as Coco, from the looks of her. Eleanor watched as the two of them compared each other’s bellies, laid their hands on the places where at that very moment their babies were probably kicking.
