Her children never wanted to come to Brookline anymore, and Eleanor no longer pushed it. Every Saturday now, she made the trip to Akersville to see which of her children she might persuade to go out for lunch with her or—if the weather was good—on a picnic. Mostly, the one who’d be up for this was Toby. In winter, they’d make snowballs and line them up in rows. In spring he liked to go to Agway and look at the baby chicks in the incubator or, when it wasn’t the season for chicks, to study the tools. In summertime, he wanted to go to some lake or other. He didn’t swim, but he liked to put his feet in the water.
“Webbed foot,” he said, when Eleanor untied his shoes for him. He liked the feeling of the mud on his toes.
A man in town had a collection of old Mack trucks in his yard that Eleanor and Toby liked to check out. It didn’t matter if they’d been there the week before. He was always happy at Sorley’s Truck Museum. They’d climb into the cabs of Toby’s favorites—an old dump truck from the forties and a snowplow and a fire engine—to work the manual windshield wipers, and after, he would sign the guest book Mr. Sorley had set up in the yard, tied to a post, with a pencil alongside. The names went back almost thirty years. Not many people visited the truck museum anymore. Mostly, the names in the visitor’s book were theirs.
Sometimes she took Toby fishing at a spot below the waterfall, the same place where, years before, they used to launch their little homemade boats bearing the cork people. The same place she’d first met Timmy Pouliot when he was about the age her son was now.
One day, sitting next to her by the water, Toby had set down hispole suddenly and looked at her with a kind of intensity in his gaze that she had not seen since before the accident.
“Boats,” he said. “We put boats in the water.”
It was like the runoff after the spring thaw—the way a pine cone, or a boatload of cork people, that had gotten wedged among the weeds suddenly came dislodged, and once it did, how the water carried it, bobbing and tumbling, over the rocks. A memory buried in the mud of Toby’s damaged brain had returned to him. Memories being, for Toby, the rarest commodity.
“That’s right,” she told him. “We made little people out of corks with toothpicks stuck in them and put them in paper boats to be the passengers. You thought up names for them all. We ran alongside the brook watching them go. There was this one called Bob. Another was Elvis.”
A look came over her son’s face, as if a door had opened somewhere, that had been shut for a long time.
“One time,” she told him, “your boat tipped over and all your cork people fell out. You had them belted in with rubber bands, but they fell out anyway. Your sisters and I tried so hard to comfort you, but you cried all the way home.”
“Cork people,” he said dreamily. “Nobody sees them anymore, but the cork people are still down there someplace.” In eight years, this might have been the most he’d ever said.
It was like what happens when the clouds covering the sun part all of a sudden to let the light through. Just for a moment. That was how it felt seeing Toby as he was at that moment, when the memory returned to him. It occurred to Eleanor that everything that happened was inside him still. Just deep underwater. Water, or mud.
Toby went back to his fishing then. Whatever glimpse he had been given, for that one brief moment, of their long-ago lives, it was gone again—the memories of Bob and Crystal and Elvis, Betty and Pamela and Harriet.
Sometimes, Eleanor reflected, it might be better for a person to remember less.
76.
The Last Cubs Fan
At the supermarket sometime in late winter—a quick stop to pick up groceries on her way home from seeing the children—shopping in the way Eleanor did now, one small meal at a time—a familiar-looking person caught her attention. Familiar, but not.
He was standing in the canned-foods aisle: a tall figure, so gaunt it would not have been difficult to imagine his clothes falling off his body onto the linoleum. At first she couldn’t see his face—just thin fingers reaching up for a can of soup. But even from the back, she recognized something about him. The slumping shoulders, maybe. Thin wisps of hair sticking out under a baseball cap—an odd choice, for this time of year.
It took a minute to place him. It was the cap that did it—a red C in a blue circle, rare for a person making his home in Red Sox country. The fingers were so much thinner now, but she had seen that hand before. Reaching for a softball.
Harry Botts had been a Cubs fan. A Chicago native, he had chosen, as his team, one with a worse hard-luck story than even the Red Sox. Eleanor remembered how, years ago, Harry had talked about his team back home and his eternal hope for a pennant.
It had only been three years since Eleanor had seen him. In the old days, he’d been a little chubby. He was skeletal now. When he turned around, hearing her call out his name, his skin seemed to be stretched over his skull like a sheet that doesn’t fit the bed, and it was mottled with odd-looking black splotches.
She knew what it was. The disease everyone was so terrified about. AIDS.
Some people said you got the virus from touching a person whohad it. But there was no way, seeing her ex-husband’s old teammate like this, that Eleanor wasn’t going to put her arms around him.
“Oh, Harry,” she said. No point asking, “How’ve you been?”
“You recognized me,” he said. “Most people don’t.”
“How many Cubs fans do you think there are in this town, anyway?” she said.
“One, for now,” he said. “Maybe one less in the near future.”
He was carrying one of those baskets you use, shopping, if you were only picking up a few items. All he had in it: Jell-O and five cans of Campbell’s soup.
“I don’t get out much,” he said. “Just laying in supplies.”
“Not a lot of protein there,” she said. “Let me take you out to dinner. Buy you a steak.”
