Not so many years ago, Peggy and Bob had buried their younger child, but they were going for it again. That was the thing about a pregnancy. It represented hope that the future might offer something that the past had taken away. Another chance.
How long did Eleanor stand there, taking it in? The four of them were laughing about something—one of those pregnancy symptoms like how you get up five times in the night to pee, or an unlikely craving for ramen noodles or Eskimo Pies. A person could not have guessed, observing the two of them—Peggy and Coco—that only a handful of years earlier, one of them had spent a season at Boston Children’s, watching her child fade away. Not so long before that, Coco was teaching Gina how to execute a cartwheel.
Eleanor could still remember that last summer she spent sitting with Peggy—Gina bald and close to skeletal in her wheelchair, the blue veins visible under the translucent skin of her naked skull, Toby—Toby as he was then—looking baffled and worried when she’d ignored his offer of a mozzarella stick. Everybody always wanted to play with Toby, but Peggy and Bob’s daughter was already leaving the world by then. The other children sensed it. Other than Toby, they’d all hung back.
Within the space of a couple of years, Gina would be dead and Toby would be sitting on the couch with a look on his face as blank as the screen of Eleanor’s computer when she first turned it on. Now here they all were again—one character gone, another two on the way, the cards shuffled, deck redealt.
The show began. From up on the stage, Katie Olin was holding out a bowl and looking hungry.
“Please, sir, may I have some more?” she said.
Eleanor kept her eyes on Ursula, the fourth orphan to the right. She wondered if Peggy Olin, seeing Ursula, was imagining who Gina would be now if she had lived, whether she’d be up there on the stage with her sister and her friend. Sometimes, observing other people’s non-brain-injured nine-year-old sons, Eleanor caught herself trying to imagine who Toby would have been at this age. But there was nobody remotely like him, so that never worked. Toby had been a shooting star.
Cam and Coco’s son, Elijah, was born that fall. Cam called to tell the children the news. That afternoon, he drove to Brookline to pick them up to meet their new brother.
Their brother. That’s how they spoke of him. Not their half brother. Watching the car pull away, containing the three people she loved best in the world, going off to meet a person who would be part of their family now (theirs, not hers), she felt like a woman lost at sea. There had been a shipwreck, and the rescue boats had circled around and managed to pick up the survivors. Except for Eleanor.
69.
No More Onions in the Bed
Growing up, Eleanor had lived in a household where the only touch seemed to occur behind closed bedroom doors, between her parents. She had craved affection, and finally—for a while there—she’d gotten it. For close to ten years, Eleanor had not known a night without a human body pressed up against her own. Not only Cam’s skin against hers, but the warm and occasionally damp presence of her children wandering into their bed at midnight—small sojourners bearing their blankets and pillows—a stuffed meerkat, the piece of ribbon Toby liked to wind around his pointer finger when he sucked his thumb, the other end twirled inside the pearly shell of his ear. For a while there, Alison had insisted on bringing into bed (first her own bed, but later in the night, the bed of her parents) a doll she’d named Onion Head, made out of a sprouted onion, with a kerchief tied around the bulb of the onion that served as the doll’s head. Over the weeks, the onion had acquired a smell so rank that Cam had finally laid down the law.
“I draw the line at sleeping with onions,” he said, but in the end they let Alison into their bed anyway.
No more onions in the bed. No more anyone.
All those nights that Eleanor lay on the old futon—the same futon where in days past she’d given birth—with the hot breath of one child or another on her face, their hands on her belly, her breasts—silky hair tangled into her own, no inch of her body unclaimed, not even her brain, because she could never stop thinking about them or anticipating what they’d need next.
“I’m possessed,” she told Cam. “By children.”
Sometimes now, alone in her bed at night, Eleanor ran her own hands over her skin just to remind herself what it felt like, beingtouched. The thought had occurred to her that if she never experienced warm human touch again she might just wither up. Stroking your own skin wasn’t the same as the touch of another person. A familiar body, a familiar person. A person you loved, who loved you back.
If she and Cam had made it through, now might have been the moment they started having more sex again, but as it was, nothing was a clearer reminder of what had been lost than the unoccupied space in her bed. She filled it with pillows and books and a sketch pad, where, when she woke in the middle of the night—as she did a lot these days—she could scribble down ideas for greeting cards.
One time, late at night, in her bed, she’d written a long letter to Cam. “I just want to talk about our children sometimes,” she wrote. “We might not be married, but we’re still parents together.” No response.
This was probably the worst part: the silence. It seemed as though everything that had happened between her and the man she once loved, and still shared three children with, had melted away, or that it had never happened in the first place. All those years they were a family seemed to have been wiped from the memory of the man who used to be her husband as surely as if it had been Cam, not Toby, who’d ended up facedown in the pond that day with his brain deprived of oxygen, the memory of every beautiful thing gone.
Who could say what Cam thought about that time? Eventually he had made a whole other life for himself, and except for the fact that the marriage he went on to make, with his new partner, his new child, took place on the same piece of land, under the same roof, where the two of theirs had played out, all memory of their old days seemed to have been erased. It wasn’t just that the two of them turned out to have no future together. More surprising, for Eleanor, was the obliteration of their past.
There had been a time when Eleanor craved nothing so much as ten minutes alone. “I’m having Quiet Time,” she told her children, setting the timer and pouring herself a cup of tea (or, later, wine), pulling her stool up to the counter with a copy ofRedbookmagazinethat was probably two months old, to study some article about giving yourself an avocado facial, or ten interesting things to do with garbanzo beans.
Now it was always Quiet Time in Eleanor’s world. Her children still needed her—more than ever, maybe, but for driving and cooking and rounding up the materials for science projects and signing forms and finding lost sneakers. They needed her for writing checks.
When they were four and three, or seven and six, Eleanor had known everything there was to know about her daughters’ lives. Now whenever they returned from their father’s house—the place they still referred to as home—their wariness accompanied them into the Brookline condo; they moved through the rooms like double agents, their gaze conveying distrust. Their mother had let them down once, by her failure to stay married to their father. She was the one who’d left, wasn’t she? What would she do next to upend their world?
Some of it was a function of their ages, no doubt. In the old days, when they emerged from the tub she’d wrap a towel around each one of them, tight as a mummy, take them onto her lap, kiss them behind their ears, their necks, their toes. In their new life with their mother in the Brookline house, they didn’t want her in the room when they took their baths. Their bodies, that were changing so rapidly now, were hidden from her. Worse, though, so were their thoughts.
The truth was that even if their parents had stayed together, that perfect life they knew, growing up on the farm, would have had to change. But as it was, the girls attributed every bad thing to Eleanor’s departure. All their lives she had been the one who’d made it her mission to protect them from disappointment and hurt. If they experienced, now, a level of disappointment that went so much deeper than the loss of a toy or an embarrassment at a T-ball game, it must be Eleanor’s fault. It was Eleanor—the one who’d promised to protect them always—who had let them down.
They never said this. They didn’t even know it, probably. But Eleanor could see the silent disapproval on their faces, the way theylooked at her as she set the cereal on the table or called out, as they headed to school, “Did you remember your math homework?” They viewed her with a nearly perpetual air of mild irritation and occasional contempt.
You promised us one kind of life. You switched it out for another.They never said this, but their faces revealed the thought.
They blamed her for their parents’ divorce. They blamed her for the life they led now, shuttling back and forth between two houses.
Her worst offense—she knew this—was her bitterness toward their father. Most of the time she held her tongue in front of them on the topic of Cam, but now and then—mostly when she was tired, or she’d had a glass of wine or two, when her own father’s ghost seemed to inhabit her—she said things she’d regret later.
