Eleanor knew how much Toby loved Elijah—the one person in the family whose developmental level remained below his own, though the days were numbered when that would remain true. Every Sunday night when he returned from his father’s house, Toby talked about Elijah. Soon enough Elijah, young as he was, would be able to do things Toby could not, but for now Toby could hold him and line up blocks on the rug beside him and the two of them could play—and unlike all the other people in his life, for Elijah, playing with Toby was never a chore. Of course Toby would want to be with Elijah. Every day, if possible.
She wanted to throw her glass against the wall, but she set it down as gently as if it were fine crystal. She got up from her chair and knelt beside Toby. He was arranging his peas in a circle and humming. “I’d miss you a whole lot if you move back to the farm,” she said, “but I want you to be happy.”
“I want to be with Lijah,” Toby said. “I like my home.”
Eleanor couldn’t argue with that. She understood the feeling. Even now, even to Eleanor, the farm remained the place she loved more than any other.
Toby must have recognized this was hard for her. He patted her on the arm and laid his head on her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Mama,” he said. “You can come see me when I go live with my dad.”
Toby had a particular way of arranging his rocks, and it troubled him when one was out of place. In preparation for the move back to Akersville, the girls labeled every rock with a numbered sticker so they could re-create the lineup in the upstairs bedroom at Cam’s house he’d share with Elijah now.
“I’ll bring him down to see you on weekends,” Cam told Eleanor when she brought Toby to the house.
For a few weeks, they tried this. But Toby didn’t like leaving Elijah, or his goats.
Mostly, now, when Eleanor and Toby spent time together it was in Akersville. She took him bowling a couple of times, with bumpers in the gutters so he’d knock over some pins. (There was no further need to require that he recite the No-Cry Pledge. He didn’t care whether he knocked over any pins.)
Darla—who had recently begun attending Cam and Toby’s yoga classes, mostly as a way of trying not to let life with Bobby get her down—reported that everyone in the class loved Toby.
“Cam’s incredibly patient with him,” she said. “In spite of everything, I’ve got to hand it to the guy.”
After he moved back to the farm, Eleanor made a point of calling her son up most nights just so he could hear her voice. She always asked him about his day, without expecting much of a response.Played with goats. Little brother. Veggie burgers.Coco. Dad.
“Come see me at my house,” he told Eleanor. He didn’t really want to come to her home in Brookline anymore, but he never understood why she couldn’t come to his.
72.
My Mother Just Hit Me
Sometime that fall, Al picked up a Guns N’ Roses CD. It was calledAppetite for Destructionand the cover featured skulls on a cross. A year before, Al’s artists of choice had been New Kids on the Block. Now all she wanted to listen to, for hours every day—up in her room with her computer manuals and her Commodore 64—was “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and “Welcome to the Jungle,” with an occasional dose of the Indigo Girls.
That night they’d had one of their arguments—something to do with Eleanor’s request that Al write a thank-you note to her grandparents for the back-to-school gift they’d sent her, a dress that looked like something Shirley Temple might have worn in one of those old black-and-white movies they used to watch together after they got their VCR, on snow days, snuggled up on the couch with the popcorn.
“Why should I thank people for a present I hated?” Al said. “I’ll never wear that dress. I threw it out already.”
“It shows they were thinking about you,” Eleanor told her. “It’s the thought that counts.” She hated the sound of her own voice saying this. She was starting to sound like a greeting card.
“It shows they don’t know me at all.” Al stabbed her fork into her tofu. “If they paid any attention they’d know I hate dresses.” Especially a dress with lace ruffles down the front and buttons shaped like hearts.
The truth was, Eleanor didn’t have much affection for Cam’s parents, either. But she believed in good manners, and part of that meant writing thank-you notes.
“You want me to be fake?” Al said. “Maybe I want to be real for a change.”
Al did not say to her mother that for her, just going off to school in the morning felt fake. The person she was inside bore almost no resemblance to the one people perceived her to be, named Alison. Ever since she was four years old, and maybe even before this, she had been telling her parents this. Nobody listened.
She got up from the table. She carried her plate into the kitchen and jammed it in the dishwasher.
A minute later, from up in her room came the sound of Guns N’ Roses, the voice of Axl Rose screaming “Welcome to the Jungle... I wanna watch you bleed.” Louder than normal, even.
Eleanor stood at the foot of the stairs and called up to Al to turn down the music. No change in volume. She climbed the steps, knocked, then opened the door to her older daughter’s room.
“I asked you to turn down the music.”
No response. Eleanor might as well be invisible. The same way Cam had treated her for years now. That was what set her off, probably.
Eleanor knew, even as she did this, that she would regret it later, but she couldn’t stop herself. She advanced into Al’s room. She didn’t just turn off the music. She unplugged the boom box, whipping it off the table with enough force that she knocked over Al’s stack of Mandarin tapes and her collection of Japanese comic books.
