Count the Ways

by Joyce Maynard

  “What do you know?” Eleanor stepped onto the porch. “All my children in one place. When was the last time that happened?”

  She just stood there for a moment, taking in the sight of them. Her family. This had been the thing she wanted more than anything else, all her life, and she had gotten it. Just not as she’d imagined.

  In many ways, Al was the least changed of the three. His gender had altered, but not his unyielding refusal to say or do anything that felt inauthentic. Now he reached out to embrace his mother, and for a long moment, the two of them just stayed that way. There was no need to say anything.

  Ursula hung back, her silence heavy in a way her older brother’s was not.

  It had always been Ursula who had felt a need to put a cheerful face on everything, like one of those yellow stickers kids used to attach to their notebooks. That endlessly loving, hopeful, perpetually smiling person Ursula had been no longer existed, any more than the wild, exhausting, impossible, and endlessly lovable red-headed son did.

  Ursula had been Eleanor’s easiest child, until she became the hardest. And for a while, it had seemed to Eleanor that she’d never get over the last words Ursula had spoken to her, never survive the loss of her daughter, and of Louise.

  But Eleanor had suffered that loss so long now, the wound of Ursula’s words to her that day had repaired itself. Not healed—never that—but she had learned to live with the injury, much as Coco had no doubt learned to walk again. With a limp.

  “Hello, Ursula,” she said.

  It occurred to Eleanor that they were standing in the spot where Eleanor used to set Ursula in her Johnny Jump Up, to keep her entertained while she planted her bed of zinnias outside the porch, that first May after her birth. The spot Eleanor used to pull up, every Friday afternoon (in a different decade), to drop the three of them off with their father.

  “Mom.” Ursula hadn’t exactly smiled when she caught sight of Eleanor, but just hearing her say the word was more than Eleanor had received from her daughter in three years, more than she expected anymore. Well, she no longer expected anything.

  “How was your drive?” Ursula said—the question people asked, Eleanor recognized, when they didn’t know what else to say.

  “This is your granny, Lulu,” she told the little girl.

  Ursula set down the boutonniere. A little stiffly, she put her arms around her mother, close enough that Eleanor could feel her daughter’s pregnant belly pushing against her own. Whatever pain and hurt Eleanor had suffered—and there’d been an ocean of that, for Ursula, too, no doubt—didn’t matter at the moment.

  “I missed you.” That doesn’t begin to convey it, she might have added. But she’d leave it simple. They were here now.

  “This is Louise.”

  “Would it be okay if I picked her up? Some children this age aren’t wild about strangers.”

  “You’re not a stranger,” Ursula told her. “I’ve shown her your picture.” She handed the little girl to her mother.

  “It’s okay, Lulu,” she said to Louise. “She won’t hurt you.”

  They’d set up the chairs in the meadow, the same spot where Eleanor and Cam had been married so long ago. Five or six rows of chairs, facing out to the meadow where the peach tree stood, where—thirty-two years before—they’d attempted to bury the placenta of their firstborn child, only the ground was frozen.

  Scanning the rows of guests, Eleanor picked out the faces she recognized. There was Bonnie Henderson—the one of the wives who never let any of them forget how many orgasms she had with Jerry, particularly nights he hit a home run. The two of them had split up back in the nineties. “But what do you know?” she told Eleanor—she and the old pitcher from the Yellow Jackets, Rich McGann, had fallen in love after Rich’s wife, Carol, realized she was gay and Jerry reunited with his high school sweetheart at his twenty-fifth high school reunion. “You wouldn’t believe the sex,” she told Eleanor, of her new life with Rich. “Every night of my life, I thank God for Cialis.”

  The front row of chairs, on one side, was filled with members of Teresa’s family. The bride’s father wore a dark suit, his stout and beautiful raven-haired wife, a lacy suit with an enormous corsage. If they were having a problem with their daughter’s choice of Al for her husband, their faces betrayed nothing. The bride’s mother, Claudia, dabbed her eyes with a hanky, same as the mother of any bride might, marrying any groom. (The good news was, this one made a great deal of money. More important, he would be—here was one thing Al would have retained from his days as Alison—a deeply loyal person. When Al made a promise, he kept it.)

  Eleanor and Louise were standing next to an unfamiliar-looking young woman—one of Al and Teresa’s friends, evidently, who’d flown in from the West Coast. Her name was Heather.

  “Can you even believe how beautiful this place is?” she said. “Al told us about his dad’s farm, but I never pictured how totally awesome everything would be. I mean, I come from total suburbia. It must have been so cool, growing up here. The old farmhouse and the studio and everything. The pond.”

  “It’s a nice place, all right,” Eleanor said.

  “And it’s just so great how Al’s dad created all this. He must be an amazing person.”

  Eleanor studied Heather’s face briefly. She was probably not even thirty. No doubt she was exceedingly good at designing computer programs.

  This might have been the moment when Eleanor stepped over the line. She could even feel the familiar tightening in her chest. Her heartbeat quickened. Her face felt warm. It would be so easy to go to Crazyland now.

  Only, she didn’t. Crazyland was a far-off country now. Holding firmly to her granddaughter, she knew this: she would not be visiting that place again.

  The Mexican band had started playing again, and she spotted Cam, walking very slowly down to the spot where the chairs and the arbor were set up. He was wearing a suit jacket Eleanor recognized—the one he’d worn when they got married, and when they’d gone to the bank to take out a loan for a new furnace, and she’d been worried they’d get turned down. He’d worn it again when they went to court to sign the divorce decree.

  She couldn’t see his face, only the back of his head as he reached the spot where the ceremony was set to take place. He was talking to Ursula, and to the two people—a woman, and a man who was clearly a priest—who appeared to have been enlisted to offer a blessing. They were looking at the sky, assessing the likelihood of rain, from the looks of things. The sky had been steadily darkening, and from the east they could make out the sound of thunder, closer now. There was a feeling in the air of a storm on the way.

  Cam turned around briefly then, and for a moment, Eleanor wondered if this was not him at all, but his father, Roger, except Roger was dead. Cam’s body appeared to have shrunk that much; he looked that old. Always a lean man, he seemed close to skeletal now, his neck too thin for the shirt he was wearing, so a wide gap was visible between skin and fabric. You could have slid your whole hand in that space.

  But the part that shocked her was Cam’s face. He was still a handsome man, but his cheeks were sunken. His skin had a gray cast to it, and his eyes bore the look of a person who has seen something visible only to himself. Something hard. He had always borne an air of detachment, but he seemed now to be someplace else altogether.

  A bell sounded, signaling the time for whatever guests were still milling around to take their seats for the ceremony. Eleanor’s newfound granddaughter clung tight, studying Eleanor’s bird necklace, and for Eleanor, that was all that mattered. She studied the little girl’s face, with no impulse to locate in it a resemblance to her own three children. This was a new person; who she looked like was nobody but her own self.

  Up until now, it was the Mexican band that had played for them, but now, from two speakers facing out to the assembled guests, came the recording of a song she actually knew. “A Simple Love,” by Melissa Etheridge. From the direction of the goat pen, the bride made her way across the
field, preceded by Ursula and the other bridesmaids. Louise, still in Eleanor’s arms, and seeing Ursula at the front of the procession, waved and called out, “Mama.” She showed no signs of concern that it was Eleanor and not her mother holding her.

  The bride, Teresa, had reached the spot in front of the assembled guests where Al stood, waiting for her in his dark blue suit—his hands folded in front of him, his eyes full of love.

  The woman officiant welcomed the group—first in Spanish, then English. The woman—a friend of the bridal couple, ordained for the day—read a poem by Wendell Berry called “The Country of Marriage.” Off in the distance, the darkening clouds caused the assembled guests to look up at the sky again, but the rain was holding off.

  Teresa’s brother Mateo read Sonnet 17 by Pablo Neruda. “Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde . . .”

  Ursula read Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Eleanor looked over toward Cam as their daughter spoke the words. Hard to say if he remembered another wedding in this spot, another voice—his own—speaking the same words long ago.

  The priest asked them if they agreed to a long list of promises, which they did, and pronounced them husband and wife. For a surprisingly long time, they kissed.

  From where she stood at the back of the assembled guests—Louise nuzzling her neck and making bird sounds inspired by her necklace—Eleanor studied the face of the man she used to be married to, seated in the front row—present at the births of her children, absent at the moment their son entered the pond. They were back on the exact piece of land where they’d started out their marriage, thirty-three years earlier.

  Here she was, in the place where the best things that ever happened in her life had taken place. Also the most awful. Always before, when she came back, the thought of all that had felt crushingly sad. But they’d survived, in one way or another. And the fact that this was so seemed now, suddenly, like a kind of miracle.

  Al was in love. Toby had his goats and his chickens. He had his home on this farm. (And he could read now, and drive the tractor, and call up his classmate from Dr. Almendinger’s clinic, Kara, to talk about the new episode of Glee.) Whatever bitterness Ursula still carried toward her mother, and no doubt she did—many people had issues with their mothers—it appeared that they might actually be speaking to each other again. More than that, maybe. With luck, Eleanor might actually get to be a grandmother to Louise, and the new baby none of them had met yet.

  A thought came to her. Not a thought at all so much as a feeling. It was time to forgive her children’s father. And to ask for the same.

  This was when they heard it—that sound, like an explosion of gunpowder, followed by a terrible cracking, a long, deep groan, like a piece of the earth breaking apart. Then came a crash, when whatever it was that broke fell to the ground. The sky lit up, then darkened. Now the rain came down. Whole sheets of it. So much rain it was hard to see what was going on.

  “Oh, God,” someone cried out. Someone else: “Dios mío.”

  “It’s okay,” Eleanor whispered to Louise, who was holding on to her very tightly now, but not crying. “I’ve got you.” From the top of the hill where the house sat they heard an enormous crash, the loudest yet.

  Already drenched, they headed up the hill to survey the damage.

  99.

  One of the Great Things About Rocks

  At first, after it had fallen, all anyone could take in was the sight of the felled ash tree, Old Ashworthy, struck by lightning—now lying across the front yard, branches splayed in all directions.

  “Some tree,” Toby said. With one minor variation, this was the same thing Charlotte the spider had written, in her web, of Wilbur the pig, in his all-time favorite book from his childhood.

  They all just stood there, too stunned to say anything more. Then they noticed the rest.

  Old Ashworthy had been a tree of such height and breadth that for a few moments the sight of it toppled had obscured what lay beneath. Now, through the vast expanse of broken branches and leaves, they recognized the house, or what was left of it. Through the tangle, Eleanor could make out pieces of roof, and the dormer and a couple of shattered casement windows. The chimney was still standing, but everything that surrounded it had been crushed: roof demolished, walls flattened, furniture smashed, shards of Fiesta ware dishes and pieces of furniture. A single beam that had spanned the length of what was once her kitchen—spaghetti carbonara every Sunday, their tradition—upended so it was pointing skyward, like an arrow.

  After they’d taken it all in—the splintered trunk, the splayed branches, the tangle of limbs and leaves, and everything that lay beneath all that, which was an entire house, demolished—beds, tables, chairs, dishes, dresses, books, old records and CDs, summer hats and winter boots, flyswatters, electric fans, a hot water bottle, a Cabbage Patch doll, a sink, a waffle iron, a one-quarter-size violin—after they took it in (but really, who could?), a surprising thing happened.

  A person might have expected that the one to step forward and say something at such a moment would have been Cam. Or possibly Al. Ursula, maybe—forever the caretaker. The one who had designated herself as the fixer of all things broken.

  But it was Toby who spoke. In his usual slow and slightly off-center way, he loped toward the mountain of broken pieces that used to be their home, placed himself in the center, and—peering intently—bent down to retrieve something. To anyone who didn’t know him, what he held out to show the assembled guests would have appeared to be nothing but a random rock, only it wasn’t. It was a particular rock, as they all were in his collection.

  “You know one of the great things about rocks?” he said. “They don’t break.”

  Even then, nobody else could say anything. If the damage had been less, this might have been the moment to rally the group in some kind of cleanup effort, but they were way beyond that possibility. This was a bomb site. This was the end. Mount Saint Helens, after the eruption. The Challenger exploding. The World Trade Center after the towers fell. The mangled vehicles after the accident that killed Timmy Pouliot and left the woman on the back of his bike—Elijah’s mother—with a couple of steel rods in her leg.

  Al had his arms firmly around Teresa. Jake was doing the same for Ursula. Eleanor held tight to Louise. Then Cam took a few steps to join Toby and put his arm around his son. Thin as he was, he still possessed an air of strength that Eleanor remembered from long ago. This, more than anything else—more than his handsome face, his glorious red hair—had drawn her to him. It should not have come as a surprise to Eleanor that the loss Cam chose to remark on first was not that of the house, a fact she loved about him, even now.

  “This was a really great tree,” he said.

  Later, they would remark on all the ways it could have been worse. Because Cam had recently constructed the new building on the property, most of the family’s essential possessions (surprisingly few) had not been in the house at the moment the tree came down on top of it. Cam’s lifetime collection of unsold burl bowls was safe, as were the children’s artworks from back when they were young, his mother’s double-wedding-ring quilt. What was lost had been all the things nobody actually used anymore, but hadn’t gotten around to throwing out.

  “Thank God I gathered up all the photograph albums last summer and brought them to Vermont,” Ursula observed. Eleanor experienced a small moment of gratitude that her daughter had evidently cared about the record of a childhood and a stretch of years that had included her.

  Later, the topic came up of homeowner’s insurance (the coverage which, someone pointed out, would probably allow for the construction of a more modern and energy-efficient structure: Marvin windows, granite countertops, that kind of thing). Someone else mentioned the name of a guy with an excavator—the son of Buck Hollingsworth, the backhoe operator who’d dug the pond so many summers back, the children’s hero, who had invited Toby into the cab of his machine that time, to work the bucket th
at dug the hole that made the very body of water in which, twelve months later, he’d end up facedown, rocks in his pockets, as his brain cells died, one by one.

  “Cubby Hollingsworth,” Sal Perrone was saying. “The guy’s an artist with an excavator. When he gets done with the cleanup here, you’ll never know there was ever a tree here, or a house.”

  Was this supposed to be a good thing?

  For several moments, nobody knew what to do. Then Al took charge. “Listen, everyone,” he announced. “Lo que importa es que todos están bien.”

  The only thing that matters is that everyone’s all right.

  He took a moment to survey the wreckage. Ursula joined him.

  “This family’s had to adapt to some major events before. We’ll get through this one.”

  “And let’s not forget,” Al said, reaching for Teresa’s hand, “we’ve got a wedding to celebrate. There’s a great meal waiting for you all, over at the tent, so what do you say we head over there and get some food?”

  Al and Teresa had hired a company in Peterborough to cater the wedding dinner—platters of artisanal cheese, poached salmon and leg of lamb with fresh English peas, a salad of organic greens served up in a giant burl bowl, bread baked in a wood-fired oven, and a dark chocolate cake with fresh raspberries. Off to the side, for the vegan crowd, there was quinoa and kale salad, and some kind of nut loaf. In spite of the events that preceded the dinner, or maybe because of them, everyone seemed to have a big appetite.

  Maybe the shared experience of calamity had bonded the group in unexpected ways. For whatever reason, the conversation was livelier than at most weddings Eleanor remembered. She finally managed to meet Teresa, who embraced her like a daughter, which she was now. The Mexican American contingent and the yoga contingent and the gender fluid and the programming tribe and the retired softball players could be observed in animated conversation. Most seemed to favor the catered meal over the healthy fare. Even one of the yoga group could be observed loading a second helping of lamb on his plate. Louise, for her part, mostly focused on the cake—some of which ended up in her mouth, some on her white dress—and on gathering up the retablos on everyone’s table.