Like Eleanor, Diana had tried so hard to be a good mother, whatever that was, though no doubt she had fallen short in many ways. This had connected them.
85.
The Life of Some Whole Other Person
Afilm company in L.A. bought the rights toThe Cork People. They were turning it into an animated TV series. Another check arrived, bigger than the earlier ones.
Once every six weeks, Eleanor and Toby made the trip to the clinic of Dr. Almendinger. After years in which Toby could only manage the simplest phrases, he could tell them stories now. He had made a friend at the clinic—Kara, the brain-injured girl from California. When they went bowling, he could knock down some pins, and he cared about his score.
Her son was seventeen years old now; his voice had changed, and his body was filling out. He still carried rocks in his pockets, still loved goats. When he grew up, he said, he wanted to be a strawberry farmer. That, or breed rabbits, though only for pets, not meat. He would live on his father’s farm forever, that much was sure. Except for his trips to Baltimore with Eleanor, to Dr. Almendinger’s clinic, there was no place else he wanted to be.
If you had told Eleanor, twelve years earlier, that she’d be spending one week out of every month in a fluorescent-lit classroom, doing puzzles with her teenage son—lining up stars, triangles, rectangles, and circles by color, matching the animal with the sound he made, readingHop on Pop—she would have called that a picture of tragedy. But Toby’s accident and the years that followed had taught her patience.
Very slowly—in increments almost too small to measure—Toby was doing better. He might never live on his own or hold a regular job, but he could catch a ball, and crochet a potholder for the woman he considered his grandmother, and write a postcard to his little brother. Sometimes, sitting on the couch with him, watching a cartoon together—or dropping him off at the farm after one of their Baltimore trips, watching him burst out of the car and run to Elijah,who would be waiting for him at the door—Eleanor would see on her son’s face the most radiant smile, unencumbered by the ambivalence or wariness of her other two children. Nothing about him but his red hair resembled the person he had been before, but in some ways, he had become, of the three of them, the one in possession of the greatest capacity for joy, and the one who provided the greatest joy to those who loved him.
Al was off at college, spending most nights in a computer lab, building programs—a whole other language Eleanor could not understand. A couple of years had passed since she’d come back to see any of them, not even to the farm.
Ursula, at college in Vermont, was interested in nothing but her boyfriend, Jake. To someone who didn’t know her well, it would have appeared that Ursula was an unusually cheerful and easygoing person, but Eleanor recognized something else in her. She was wound tight as one of those rubber band balls Toby liked to make—always busy, always taking care of everyone around her, but harboring a generally well-concealed resentment of this role. Even if she was the one who’d chosen it.
The success of Eleanor’s book provided plenty of money, but changed very little. It seemed to her as if she were a cork person herself, who had gone over the waterfall. Not at the bottom of the brook just yet, but off in the weeds, just barely visible, as swift and icy water raced past. She had made it through some rough patches.
At age thirty she had imagined she knew where she’d be for the rest of her life and what she’d be doing there. Now, the future looked like some vast body of water with no shoreline in sight.
The producers of the animated seriesThe Cork Peopleinvited Eleanor to a screening for the first episode—a first-class ticket, a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Eleanor invited Toby and Ursula to come with her (no point asking Al, she was barely communicating), but air travel made Toby nervous and Ursula didn’t want to be away from Jake.
No doubt there was more to it. There seemed almost a direct relationship between how attached Eleanor’s children had been to her in the old days and how distant they had grown in recent years.For Eleanor, the distance that existed now between herself and her daughters was a grief greater than anything she’d known, including the deaths of her parents, and in her worst moments, she had pointed this out to them, not that they needed reminders. Their father was the one, not she, who’d found someone he loved better. But the way the story of the divorce had taken shape in their minds, she remained—after all these years—the one her daughters saw as responsible for the breakup of their family.
Eleanor knew some of the reasons why, of course. She was the one who remained angry, and she could no more conceal it than a person with a port-wine stain can cover it with foundation. The red part kept bleeding through. There was almost a smell to her bitterness. She knew this without being able to contain it.
She had not succeeded in keeping the promise she and Cam had made to each other that night, in the first days of their separation, when they’d agreed they would never speak badly of each other to their children. But of all the critical and angry remarks she’d let them overhear, and had directly addressed to them, she had never told her children about their father’s affair with Coco—the kiss at the waterfall, Cam’s announcement that he was in love with Coco, and his declaration to Eleanor that night that he was done with their marriage. For a long time she had believed he’d tell them himself, and by the time she realized he never would, the damage was done. If she told them now, they’d see her as trying to alienate them from their father. And maybe they’d be right.
Here was the irony. The thing Eleanor had done to hold on to her children’s love—signing over, to their father, the farm that meant more to her than any place on earth—was the thing, more than any other, that made it possible for her children to keep her at a distance. She could fly them to Club Med with her, fly them to Hollywood, or not—but the farm was home to them and always would be. And she was no longer welcome there. All those years she spent reading picture books and constructing cork people, picking out library books, helping with science projects and making valentines and Halloween costumes, driving to games—it all felt like the life of some whole other person than the one she was now.
86.
The Red Carpet
She called Darla. “Come to L.A. with me,” she said. “You can be my date at the screening. We’ll take one of those cheesy tours of stars’ houses and go to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and Venice Beach. We’ll go shopping on Melrose Avenue.”
“You know how much I’d love that,” Darla told her. “But I can’t. I’ve got even bigger plans for that weekend.”
In all the time they’d been friends, Darla had hardly ever had plans.
“I’m finally doing it,” Darla said. What she’d been talking about since the day Eleanor met her. She was moving out.
She could only talk for a minute. Bobby was passed out on the couch, but you never knew with him when he might come to, mad as a bear with his foot in a trap. Her voice was low, but excited.
“I put a deposit down on a place outside of Arlington, close enough to mortuary school that I can take night classes. My cousin Ricky’s coming down from Maine with a U-Haul as soon as Bobby leaves for work.”
No explanation necessary. The only way for Darla to get out of the house the two of them had shared all those years was to do it fast, while he was gone, and be out of there before he got home. The only person she could tell, besides her cousin and Kimmie, was Eleanor.
“This is the best news,” Eleanor said. “I’ll be back in five days. We can go yard-saling, find stuff for your place.”
“Just so long as we steer clear of Akersville,” Darla told her. “If Bobby knows where I’ve gone he’ll come after me. You know what he’s like.”
The L.A. trip went fine. Everyone loved theCork Peopleseries. Eleanor got room service at her hotel and sat by the pool a lot. On MelroseAvenue—shopping alone—she bought Darla a housewarming present: a T-shirt that said, “No.How Is That for a Boundary?”
Eleanor was in a taxi coming home from the airport when she heard the news on the radio in the cab: a woman had been shot and killed at a gas station outside Arlington as she was filling her tank.
