“My brother has cerebral palsy,” the older brother said. “So you might think this would have been hard for him. But our dad never let him believe there was anything wrong with him. He hiked along on all those trails on our digs, same as I did.”
There was more in the article, but Eleanor was stuck on the photograph of the two pleasant-faced and slightly geeky young men, standing beside a glass case (one of many, evidently) housing a part of the collection they’d amassed, along with a plaque commemorating their father. Russell.
“Our dad died last year,” the older brother, Arthur, explained. “Our mother left when my brother and I were really little, so it was always just the three of us, but he worked so hard to make it okay for us. Going off on those digs on weekends, he made us feel like we were on this amazing adventure. He used to call us the three amigos.”
One night she picked up the phone to hear the voice of a teenage boy. It took Eleanor a minute, placing him.
“It’s Elijah,” he told her. “‘I’m calling from our farm.”
She had seen Elijah often over the years, times when she picked her children up to bring them someplace. As a little boy, he had reminded her of Toby, as he’d been before the accident, though he was taller than Toby, with the lanky build of his father, where Toby’s body was shorter and more compact. Elijah had not inherited Cam’s red hair. In coloring, he took after his mother.
She had always liked Cam and Coco’s son. Whatever bitterness a person might harbor toward her ex-husband or the woman he’d married, for whom he’d left her, none of it was Elijah’s doing. He always appeared, to Eleanor, like an interesting child and a kind one, where Toby was concerned, most of all. The irony had not escaped her that, having always hoped for a child who played guitar, this one—though not her own—actually did.
When he was younger, Elijah had been able to offer Toby something none of the rest of them could. He had admired Toby and looked up to him as his big brother. When, somewhere around age four, it must have become clear to him that of the two of them, he was the stronger one, he’d become Toby’s fiercest and most loyal protector—the job that had fallen to Ursula, once. If a child made fun of Toby at a 4-H fair or on a trip to the bowling alley, Elijah stepped in. If Toby was lonely, Elijah played with him. Long after the age when he’d outgrown them, he played Hungry Hungry Hippos and Operation with his brother, accompanied him on his rock hunts, and sat with him in the dirt, acting out fights between his triceratops and Toby’s T. rex. When, in sixth grade, he’d started a rock band, he’d enlisted Toby to play the bongos. In his fashion. In high school, when the band started going out on gigs, Elijah neverfailed to bring Toby along, where he stood on the stage, shaking the rhythm eggs, or in the front row, singing along to the songs Elijah had written. He knew them all.
When Elijah called that night to speak with her, Eleanor assumed it must have something to do with her son.
“Did something happen to Toby?” she said. Her stomach tightened.
“Toby’s fine,” Elijah said. “I called to ask a question. It doesn’t have anything to do with Toby. You know I’ve got this band. The Goonies. We started out just playing at school, but we’ve been getting gigs. For pay.”
Eleanor had heard something about this. From Toby, actually, so the details had been a little hazy, but amazingly, Elijah’s band had been hired earlier that winter to open for a reasonably well-known Boston band—well known to people of a certain age, though unknown to Eleanor.
The gig had gone better than any of them had expected. Afterward, the lead guitarist of the headlining band had asked Elijah if he was interested in joining them on gigs, playing rhythm guitar and providing backup vocals.
This was a serious professional band. It was a great opportunity.
The problem was rehearsals. The band met every Sunday to practice, and they already had a bunch of gigs lined up for Fridays and Saturdays at a club in Boston. Elijah could get a bus into the city, and another one home on Sundays. But gigs ran late. If he was going to do this, he’d need a place to stay.
“You’d like to stay over at my house those nights?” Eleanor said. She had plenty of space. Al’s room and Ursula’s and Toby’s. None of them occupied.
“You’d be very welcome,” she said.
“My mom thought you might not like me asking,” he told her. “But I figured, the worst you could say is no.”
“I’m happy to have you stay here,” Eleanor said. “I always hoped someone in the family would play the guitar. Until you, nobody did.”
He showed up every weekend after that. She told him, the first time he arrived with his guitar case and his backpack, not to worryabout thinking he had to socialize with her. “Consider this your place to crash, no obligation,” she said. “I’m sure you have better things to do than sit around the kitchen drinking tea with me.”
But strangely enough, Elijah seemed to like having tea with her. Many nights after band practice, when the guy who played drums, Oliver, dropped him off, the two of them—Eleanor and Elijah—would end up at the kitchen counter sipping cups of lemon ginger tea and talking about music, or school, or a girl he liked, even. He spoke about the frustrations, for a boy his age, of living so far out in the country, when what he really wanted was to be playing rock and roll with his friends.
“The farm’s such a beautiful place,” Eleanor said.
“I guess,” Elijah said. “There just isn’t that much going on. Unless you’re into yoga and goats.”
One time when he came in, she was just serving herself some leftover beef stew she’d made the night before.
“I don’t suppose you’d want any of this,” she said, guessing he was vegetarian like his parents.
“Are you kidding?” He reached for a plate.
That summer, when school got out, he moved his stereo in, and his amp. Big sneakers sat by the front door again, the way they used to when she had teenagers in the house. (Not so many of those times. By the time her children were teenagers, they’d been occasional guests at best.)
Sometimes now, from the room where he stayed (Al’s, but Al didn’t come here anymore), she could hear the sounds of unfamiliar music. Hip-hop and rap, more often than not. Singers whose names she didn’t know. Lyrics that made little sense, but it didn’t matter. Guitar riffs he was practicing, late into the night, which never bothered Eleanor. She had longed for, and missed, the sound of a teenager in the house.
92.
Another Mother Moves Out
