Toby, hearing the record now, displayed no reaction, except to be slightly annoyed by the intrusion of music. Except forThe Music Manand the theme song from the Toys “R” Us commercial (featuring that maddening line “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid”), he seemed to prefer silence most of the time. That or humming. He sat in lotus position a lot, a function of his time with his father at yoga class, staring at some object—a rock, a pencil, a stick of wood—and turning it around in his hands.
He likedMister Rogersand televised golf tournaments. He liked laying toothpicks in rows on the rug, or side-by-side paint samples that Eleanor got for him at the hardware store. Small, simple, repetitive activities.
One of the few aspects of who he was now, at nine, that had endured from his life before the accident was his habit of picking up rocks wherever he went and carrying them in his pockets. Though there appeared nothing distinctive in the specimens he collected, he resisted any suggestion of paring down his collection. Rocks filled his room—lined the walls and windowsills. Most of them were indistinguishable from each other, except to Toby, who knew every one.
71.
I Want to Go Home
Out on the highway, heading north to Akersville to pick up her children after a weekend with Cam, she’d spotted him: Timmy Pouliot on his Harley. In Massachusetts, the law required a helmet, but the minute Timmy Pouliot crossed the line back into the Live Free or Die state, he always took it off.
That’s how she knew she must be in New Hampshire now.
There was a woman on the back, of course. Timmy Pouliot always had a woman on the back of his bike. No doubt she was young and no doubt beautiful.
Eleanor only caught a glimpse of the two of them. Timmy Pouliot was going faster on the bike than she was in her old Subaru. She figured he wouldn’t have noticed. But as he passed, he raised one hand very slightly, the way Harley riders did, seeing another person on a bike, only there was nobody on a bike around. He must have been waving at her.
A feeling washed over her then. Regret, possibly.
There had been more than a few reasons Eleanor had believed she had to break things off with Timmy Pouliot as she had. But above all others was the fear of her children’s disapproval.
Now look. Her children disapproved of her anyway.
The children raised the subject at dinner on a night they’d just come home from their father’s house. She’d made spaghetti carbonara, one of their favorites. Cam was a vegan now, as was Coco, and the girls had given up meat and even dairy-based foods now, too, but spaghetti carbonara—the most comforting meal she knew—had been their tradition, and even after they shifted to the new vegan diet at Cam and Coco’s, they made an exception for this particular dish.
Eleanor set down the platter and took her seat. Except for rare occasions, they had abandoned their old tradition of singing their song, “Simple Gifts,” before beginning the meal.
“We have something we need to talk to you about, Mom,” Al said.
It had seemed like a good sign, Al saying this. They wanted to talk, for once. Eleanor was ready to listen. She waited as Al took a long breath.
“Toby wants to live on the farm with Dad,” Al said. “We all think it’s a good idea.”
She was picking out the prosciutto. Next to her, Ursula scraped the cream off the noodles.
Eleanor steadied herself. Toby? Move? Who was this “we” her daughter spoke of, who’d evidently agreed on what a good idea this was before mentioning it to her?
“I’m his mother,” Eleanor said. “He needs me.”
“It’s just too confusing for Toby, going back and forth all the time,” Ursula chimed in. “And he gets more help from Dad than at that expensive school you’re sending him to. Dad works with Toby all the time. The physical therapy and the yoga are really helping.”
“Then there’s Elijah,” Al added. “You should see how those two get along with each other.”
She had not seen this, of course. She had not seen anything that went on at their father’s house.
Ursula now: “Dad thinks it would be better if Toby could stay put. Al and I think so, too. And Coco.”
Eleanor steadied herself. She could hear, in Ursula’s words, how carefully she’d prepared them. She had probably practiced this moment in her room and discussed it with her father. (“Your mother’s not going to like this,” he would have said. “But it’ll go over better coming from you.”)
“It always takes him a whole day adjusting from one place to the other one. Plus, he really loves being around the goats.”
“Goats,” Toby said—the first time he’d weighed in. “I got four goats, Mama.” This was news to Eleanor, too.
She turned to study her son—the only one of the three of themwho seemed to be enjoying the carbonara. “How do you feel about going to live at your dad’s, Tobes?” Eleanor asked him.
“I love you, Mama,” he said. “But I want to go home.”
She didn’t have to ask her son where home was. Or any of the three of them. It didn’t matter whether she bought a trampoline, an air hockey table, or a Commodore 64 computer. Her son wanted to live on the farm with his father.
