At some point it occurred to her that the children who’d launched the cork people in the first place needed to be brought back into the story. It turned out there was a magic rock at the falls. (Toby would like that part.) When you rubbed it, you got very small, just the size of a cork person, though lacking a cork person’s useful powers of flotation. For this reason, the children—who had climbed into one of the boats themselves to follow their cork people—were constantly in jeopardy. More than once, it was one of the cork people who rescued them.
The story was a happy fantasy. The children got to be in charge of their own lives, without the troublesome interference of parents. Every day for them was a wonderful adventure in which nobody ever told them what they couldn’t do. In Eleanor’s story, they encountered danger and adversity, but they always overcame it. At the end of every one of their treacherous but thrilling escapades, the children grew back to normal size again, put the cork people in their pockets, and headed back home to their farm—just in time for dinner, it turned out. Their parents, setting the food on the table, had somehow failed to notice they’d been away. (That was parents for you. Their children might be off having these whole other lives, and all the parents would want to know was “Did you do your homework? Did you brush your teeth?”)
Never mind the parents. Now that the children knew about thespecial rock, and had made friends with their cork people, there would always be more adventures.
She worked all winter on her book, and into the spring. With the children gone, Eleanor was able to work on her story with almost no interruption. Apart from her increasingly infrequent Saturday trips back to Akersville, she spent the days at her drawing table.
As long as she kept working she felt happy. She particularly loved working on the character she based on Toby. Those hours she spent at her drawing table, it was as if she had the old Toby back.
It was all she wanted to do that winter—to lose herself in a story other than the one she was living. At some point, it seemed to her, these characters she’d created took on lives of their own, and all she was doing was telling about what she watched them doing, in her head. And she loved taking herself back to her old farm—still her favorite place in the world and the one where she’d been happiest.
She titled the bookThe Cork People. In May she mailed her manuscript to an editor who’d sent her a note long ago, asking if she had any new projects in the works.
No word for a couple of months. Then came a letter from the editor, beginning with an apology. “I hope my silence won’t be mistaken for any absence of enthusiasm,” she wrote. “I just didn’t get to your manuscript until four days ago.
“All of us love what you’ve done here,” she told Eleanor. “We’d like to offer you a contract.”
The initial advance forThe Cork Peoplewas considerably smaller than what she’d been paid for her Bodie books, but before the first book about the cork people had even come out Eleanor’s publisher asked for another one, and this time the advance was a large one. A few months later the publication rights were sold to a lot of other countries Eleanor had never been to. They’d be sending her on a European tour in addition to all the major U.S. cities.
“I don’t ever have to write one more sappy line for some anniversary card,” Eleanor told Darla the day she announced to the creative director at Sweetheart Card that she would no longer be submitting designs. “I didn’t have it in me to think up one more poem about how great it is to have a grandmother,” she said. “Or one more wayfor somebody to talk about the fact that a person died without ever using the word ‘death.’”
The Cork Peoplewas published the following fall, with sales so strong it went back for a second printing within weeks, earning more money than Eleanor would have made by selling her half of the farm.
“You can buy your own damn farm now if you want,” Darla told her.
She wasn’t interested in other farms.
After Cam and Coco took over formal ownership of the property, they had put up a sign at the end of the long dirt road leading to the house with the name of their physical therapy, massage, and retreat center, “Healing Hands.” Now when Eleanor drove there to pick up the children or deliver them back to Cam, she passed the sign, along with a second one that said simply “Namaste.”
The girls hardly ever came to Brookline for the weekends now, though she sometimes managed to wrench one of them away from the farm—for a Beastie Boys concert one time, and another time, when she got tickets to see Madonna. Mostly the girls wanted to be where their friends were.
Toby never wanted to be anyplace other than the farm. From the stories her children recounted of their lives there, she knew that Elijah was old enough now to climb the ladder up to the tree fort the girls had built long ago in Old Ashworthy. The two of them—Toby and Elijah—spent whole days up there, playing games and looking at books. Elijah was reading now, as Toby was not. They both loved rocks. Elijah had taken up the guitar, and sometimes the two of them made up songs together. Or Elijah made up songs, and Toby hummed along, clapping his hands, though seldom in time with the beat.
Toby—the person he was now, anyway, and he’d been this person for most of his life—preferred familiar things and places. He had not gotten used to Eleanor’s house, or the small yard out back, the presence of all those cars driving by, and neighbors, the streetlights shining in his window at night. Nights he stayed over, he’d wake upearly and come into her room. “Can I go home now?” he said. “Lijah needs me. I got to feed my goats.”
She didn’t argue.
Al, when she visited Eleanor’s (there was that word again, “visit”), spent most of her time on the phone with Garrett, a boy she’d met at computer camp, and a girl named Siobhan, from her school, who also wore a buzz cut and, after junior year, only answered to the name Steve. Sometimes the two of them talked so late into the night that Eleanor would find Al passed out on her bed, the phone still in her hand, the sound of nothing but a dial tone, suggesting that off in another house, miles away, Steve or Garrett had probably fallen asleep in the middle of their conversation, too.
One time, driving Ursula home from the orthodontist, Eleanor had asked Ursula about Garrett and Al’s relationship.
“Are they boyfriend and girlfriend?” she said.
“Oh, God,” Ursula said. “Did you really think Al would have a boyfriend? Are you living under a rock?”
“I was just asking,” Eleanor said.
“Al’s gay, Mom. She’s the most obviously not-straight person I ever met. If you want to know who Al’s got the hots for, it’s Steve.”
The news should hardly have been a shock, only it was. Up until then—crazily, perhaps—Eleanor had never viewed all the things about Al that had been different from other people’s children as indicative of her sexuality. Al was simply different from other kids. Now, hearing her sixteen-year-old explain this most basic information about her own child left Eleanor feeling like an idiot, and—worse—a bad mother. Here she was, a woman obsessed with meeting her children’s needs even before they named them, and in this most basic and essential way, she’d failed to see her daughter for who she really was.
She was also sad, and worried for Al. You didn’t have to harbor any moral judgment on a person’s sexual orientation to recognize that being gay was unlikely to make life easier for her daughter. It had not yet occurred to her that maybe the hardest part, for Al, was not her sexuality. It was trying to conceal who she was. Her lifemight actually be a lot easier and happier if she were able to present herself to the world as the person she had probably been all along.
“The great thing about Al,” Ursula said, “is she also doesn’t care all that much what anybody thinks about her, or if she’s doing what they want. She’s not one of those people who’s always worrying what everybody thinks and how they’re doing.”
Ursula didn’t add, but she might have, that she wished she could be more like her sister in that regard.
81.
