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 never failed 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 worry about 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
The year Eleanor turned fifty-three, on what had become their regular Sunday afternoon call, Ursula told Eleanor she had some news.
“You’re going to be a grandmother,” Ursula said.
The next day, Eleanor ordered her a copy of Spiritual Midwifery—still in print after all those years. “I know this will seem like the ultimate hippie book,” she wrote, in the note accompanying her gift. “But back when I was pregnant with you, I found a lot of wisdom in these pages. Mostly, I’m just so excited for the two of you. There was nothing that ever brought me more joy”—this was true, though she could have added the words “or more sorrow”—“than raising the three of you.”
Ursula’s impending parenthood seemed to have brought her closer to her mother. In addition to their regular Sunday afternoon conversation, Ursula called Eleanor every few days with a question, generally related to pregnancy. After all those years in which her daughter had kept her at arm’s length, hearing her voice on the other end of the line now asking about water birth, or the pros and cons of letting the new baby in your bed, felt like a wonderful and unexpected gift.
The summer after his sophomore year in high school back in Akersville, Elijah rode the bus to Boston—and the T, to Brookline—to see Eleanor. “I’ve got this crazy idea to run by you,” he told her. “It’s okay if you say no.”
He wanted to ask if she’d consider letting him move in with her. School never really worked for him, he told her. When you got down to it, all he cared about was making music. But if he lived in the city, he could get a job to pay for lessons and audition for gigs. He’d pay her rent, he told her.
“Forget about rent,” Eleanor said. “But what about school?”
He told her he’d study on his own time and get his GED.
Elijah moved into Al’s old room the next week. He was taking guitar lessons twice a week from a Berklee graduate and landed a part-time job at a music store. Within a couple of months he’d picked up work performing in clubs around the city every weekend. More often than not, in the evenings, she’d hear the sound of Elijah upstairs, practicing.
She was working at her drawing table one night when he came in with a mug of tea for her. He asked if they could talk.
“My parents are having problems,” he said. “My mom’s moving out.”
All these years, Eleanor had felt bitterness toward Cam and Coco for how happy their lives had looked to her—having the three older children around, and another of their own, their garden and Coco’s massage practice, and the big, loving gatherings she heard about—bonfires and dance parties, holiday meals. In her mind, at least, she had constructed a picture of the life they led together as a close approximation of the one she’d imagined once for herself and Cam. They seemed to have everything she had wanted, back when Ed Abercrombie first brought her out to the farm.
Now, hearing Elijah’s news, she registered nothing but sorrow. Nobody who’d lived through the end of a marriage could wish that on anyone else, not even the person partly responsible for the breakup of hers. Most of all, she felt sad for Elijah. And for her own children, of course, who loved Coco, and no doubt counted on their father’s marriage as the one model they could look to of an enduring relationship between a man and a woman.
“I’m sorry,” Eleanor said. It was no
t for her to ask what happened, but Elijah volunteered.
“My mom fell in love with someone else,” he said. “She told my dad and me last weekend.”
It might have looked to Eleanor like a form of perfect justice, Coco leaving Cam in the same way Cam had left her. Very likely whoever was replacing him was younger, as Coco had been when she moved into Cam’s life.
Observing him stacking wood out by the barn the other day when she’d been out to the farm to see Toby, she had been struck by how old he looked. He was still a handsome man, but he had looked tired. Hearing this news now, she was surprised to discover she felt sad for Cam, too.
“I can’t believe my mother took off with some idiot she met at a bar,” Elijah said. “What was she doing in a bar, anyway?”
93.
She Doesn’t Count to Ten
That weekend, the call came from Vermont: Jake, telling Eleanor that Ursula had gone into labor. All that night he called with updates, as Ursula had evidently instructed him to do. When he called to say they had a baby girl, Ursula wanted to get on the phone with her mother.
“Come meet Louise,” she said.
Fifteen minutes later Eleanor was packed and on the highway, headed to Vermont to meet her granddaughter, her heart exploding in a way she had not known was still possible.
She’d planned to stay at a hotel nearby, but Ursula surprised Eleanor by suggesting that she stay at their house. She could help with meals and laundry, and hold the baby when Ursula took a shower.
“I don’t want to get in the way,” Eleanor said.
“You won’t,” Ursula told her. “Jake and I want you here. Me in particular. It’s the kind of moment when a woman wants her mom.”
As someone who’d given birth three times, without her mother, Eleanor understood.
Later, Eleanor replayed those days—three of them, all told—for signs of the trouble that followed, but in her memory of that early, precious time taking care of Ursula and getting to know Louise, she couldn’t remember a single moment that had felt wrong, or difficult. Ursula was breastfeeding Louise, so Eleanor wasn’t needed to feed the baby, but in all the other ways, Ursula had seemed grateful for her mother’s presence. Now that she had a baby of her own, she had a new and limitless interest in the stories of her own birth and those of her siblings. The two of them—Eleanor and Ursula—sat by the woodstove, discussing every moment of Ursula’s labor—the minutiae that were lost on Jake—in a way that nobody but her mother could have cared about as much as Ursula did.
Up until this point, they’d been getting takeout and snacking on food Ursula and Jake’s friends brought by, but on the third night, Eleanor offered to cook them dinner. She had expected Ursula to ask for a vegan dish, but her daughter said, actually, what she’d love was Eleanor’s spaghetti carbonara.
They were sitting around the table—Louise in Eleanor’s arms, to give Ursula a chance to eat her meal more comfortably. Jake had opened the bottle of wine Eleanor had brought them. Ursula wasn’t drinking, but Eleanor and Jake had nearly polished it off.
“I can’t wait for Dad to meet the baby,” she said. “I’m hoping Louise can cheer him up. He’s been having such a hard time, since Coco left. It’s such a crummy thing what she did, cheating on him like that behind his back. I don’t think I can ever forgive her.”
Eleanor wrapped her arms tighter around the baby. She had some things to say about a person being unfaithful in a marriage. She knew she should keep them to herself.
Look at Louise, she told herself. What else mattered, but that she was in the home of her daughter, holding this baby? All she needed was here: those rosebud lips, the nose that even now resembled Ursula’s, the feel of her chest rising up and down, the wonderful smell on the top of her head that every newborn baby she’d ever met had, but only briefly, the feel of Louise’s quick little heartbeat under the flannel blanket, her fingers wrapped around Eleanor’s as she slept.
“I just can’t believe Coco would do something like that to Dad,” Ursula said. Maybe it was having given birth so recently that allowed her to speak of her father as she was doing, when normally she’d been so careful never to bring up his name. Maybe she just thought things were so much more comfortable with Eleanor now that the subject of Cam was no longer off-limits.
“One day he thinks everything is good,” she said, “and the next day, Coco’s telling him she’s fallen in love with some guy.”
Eleanor could feel the old familiar tightness in her chest, her heartbeat accelerating. She remembered what Ursula used to say—Ursula at age six, age eight, always the peacemaker. Trying to keep everyone happy. Take a deep breath, Mama. Count to ten.
“I always loved it, how Dad and Coco got together the way they did,” Ursula was saying. “After all those years of being our friend, helping out with us, coming over and cheering us all up after you two split up. Then finally one day it hit them, they’d fallen in love.”
Not quite. But look at the baby. All that mattered here, her granddaughter.
Jake reached across the table to Eleanor, holding the wine bottle. “We might as well finish this off, El,” he said, refilling her glass.
“It always seemed like the most beautiful story. Coco coming back from Hawaii and the two of them suddenly looking at each other and realizing they were in love.”
“It was a little different than that,” Eleanor said. She looked at her precious daughter. She could still see, in Ursula’s face, at twenty-eight, the child she’d been at seven, the day they’d sat down to tell the children they were getting a divorce. Ursula, thinking they were about to learn their parents had agreed to get baby goats.
Eleanor reached for the wine. Just one more sip. That didn’t mean she was headed to Crazyland.
“Your dad’s going to be okay,” Jake said to Ursula. “We don’t know the whole story, either. Maybe he wasn’t into her anymore, either, by the time Coco hooked up with this other guy. For all we know, it was mutual.”
Ursula wasn’t having it. “You don’t know my dad like I do,” she told Jake. “It was bad enough, seeing how broken up he was after my mom left,” she said. “Now here he goes, all over again.”
“It wasn’t like that exactly,” Eleanor said. With the baby in her arms this way, she said the words quietly. “With your father and me. I didn’t leave him. He left me.”
The minute she spoke the words, she knew it was a mistake. Across the table, Ursula shot her a look. This was the Ursula Eleanor remembered, from all those years of being the object of her younger daughter’s quiet, carefully disguised anger. That harsh, judging gaze. But worse.
“What are you talking about? You’re the one who moved out.”
Eleanor took a deep breath, as if she were about to go underwater for a very long time. A dive to the bottom. She had passed the point of no return.
“I moved out because your father had fallen in love with someone else,” Eleanor said. “If someone in that story had their heart broken, it wasn’t your father.”
“You left us. You left him to take care of everything. I remember how he was then. Even after Toby’s accident, Dad wasn’t as sad as he was when you left. I don’t know how he would have survived if Phyllis and Coco hadn’t helped out.”
Coco helped out. You bet she did. Eleanor was no longer sure if she thought the words or said them.
“Your father . . .” Eleanor said.
Don’t go there.
She did.
Later, what she would remember was Ursula across the table, taking in her words. Three days earlier, she’d given birth, but there may have been no expression on her face, in labor, to equal the pain Eleanor saw in the way Ursula looked at her now.
It was too late. Eleanor was in Crazyland.
“All this time, you actually thought that your father lived like some kind of sad monk after your heartless mother abandoned him? And Coco, the loyal family friend, was just coming by to make popcorn balls and play Monopoly? And then finally, when sh
e turned twenty-one, the two of them suddenly looked at each other and slapped their hands on their foreheads and said, ‘What do you know? We’re in love.’ You really think that’s how it happened?”
Jake had gotten up from his chair now, heading in Eleanor’s direction. He lifted their daughter from Eleanor’s arms. Returned to his place beside his wife.
“Your father was fucking the babysitter, Ursula,” Eleanor said.
Whatever it was that happened after she said that, Eleanor no longer remembered. Only that Ursula was rising from her chair, no trace of love in her eyes. Jake was standing there holding Louise.
“I can’t take one more minute of your bitterness about my dad,” Ursula said. “You want me to stop loving him, but I never will.”
It felt to Eleanor as though the ground was giving way. It felt as though her heart might stop beating, or—the opposite—explode. The room seemed to be spinning. All she could see was the face of her daughter. No sign of love there.
“Don’t come back. Don’t ever come back. Don’t plan on seeing your granddaughter ever again.”
94.
Even Better Than You Thought It Would Be
Eleanor had learned this a long time ago: Even with the things she would have said were unsurvivable, she survived them. Not without great sorrow and cost. But she kept on with her life.
For a few weeks after her return from Vermont, Eleanor spoke to nobody. She couldn’t eat. Most nights she was in bed by eight thirty. All she wanted to do was close her eyes and shut out the world.
A woman she knew from Pilates, who’d heard about Ursula’s pregnancy and the trip to Vermont to meet the baby, stopped her on the street a few days after, to ask for the details.
“There’s nothing better than being a grandparent, right?” the woman said. “As much as people tell you how great it’s going to be, until it happens to you, it’s hard to imagine.”
Count the Ways Page 39