There were toasts, of course. Ursula spoke first, as the younger sister, followed by Teresa’s brothers, then Elijah. Toby stood there beside him, but said nothing, and for a moment Eleanor registered the sadness of this.
Teresa’s parents approached the microphone together. Her mother, Claudia, spoke in Spanish, but it wasn’t difficult to get the drift of what she was saying. All a mother wants is for her children to be happy, and Teresa was. This filled her heart.
Cam waited until the Hernandez family had spoken before taking the microphone. Watching him make his way to the front of the room—the old, too-big sport jacket hanging on his frame like David Byrne’s in that Talking Heads video of their youth—Eleanor was caught up short by a wave of unexpected tenderness.
He did not look well. She worried for him. And because of how they loved him, she worried for their children.
Now he stood at the microphone.
“I want to welcome you all to our farm,” he said. (Then the words in Spanish, read from a card.)
“And though something surprising and . . . a little difficult . . . happened here this afternoon—speaking not of the marriage of my son and Teresa, of course, but about . . . you know . . . the tree—I want everyone to know that this remains a good day for our family. A great day.”
He said some more things then, about Al, and about Teresa. “Our family is your family now,” he said to her parents, without consulting his Spanish file cards. He had clearly practiced this part. “Nuestra familia es tu familia.”
“And I want to acknowledge all the people who were part of bringing us where we are today,” he said. One by one he named the children. Among the names that followed, though her absence at the wedding was notable, was Coco’s.
“Most of all, I want to honor the woman who started all this with me,” he said. He looked over in Eleanor’s direction. “You were a wonderful mother to our children, Ellie.” He paused. He looked tired.
“You are a wonderful mother.”
Louise having reunited with her parents, Eleanor stood alongside Teresa and Al, who had not taken his arm from Teresa’s shoulders the whole time. Toby joined them.
“I made you something,” he said to Al, his voice soft and halting. “It’s okay if you don’t know what it is, Teresa. My brother can explain later.”
He took two very small objects out of his pocket. At first Eleanor might have thought they were rocks, but they weren’t. They were made from corks, with bits of yarn and pipe cleaners attached, and faces. A man and a woman.
“You can let them go in the brook sometime,” he said. “Don’t worry if you lose them, or it looks like they sink.”
He paused and looked at them. His brother and his new wife, first. Then the cork people. “They’ll always be out there someplace. The ocean, maybe.”
There was dancing—a DJ, playing songs Eleanor did not know, mostly, though there were a few she did (“thrown in for our parents,” Al explained)—Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, the Beatles. Also Selena. Freddy Fender. In honor of Toby, but also the recent news of Michael Jackson, he played “Billie Jean.”
Louise stayed out on the dance floor for a good hour before Jake took her off to the house—the house that remained, the new one—to sleep.
When Ursula returned to the tent, she was carrying a box. She made her way to the table where her family was sitting and, dirty as it was, set the box on the tablecloth.
“Our time capsule,” she said. “The way it worked out, we never had to dig it up after all.”
Who would have guessed this? When the tree came down, and the roots pulled away from the earth, there it was: the time capsule the children had buried twenty-four years before.
If they thought they might find something profound inside—words that might suddenly illuminate their lives—they were disappointed. What they found, when they got the box pried open, was a package of Silly String, a Matchbox truck, a rock, a My Little Pony, a quarter with the date 1985, and a Snickers bar.
Then they noticed three worn-looking envelopes, each with a name on the front: Alison, Ursula, Toby. Al opened his first and read out loud the words he’d written almost a quarter century before, when he was eight years old.
“Dear Future Self,” the note began. “I hope when you read this that you are happy, and I hope you turned into a good person. I hope you have your own computer. I think there will be a big future in programming. I bet your parents are going to be really sorry they didn’t do what you told them and buy stock in Microsoft.”
Ursula’s next. “Dear Future Self. I hope by the time you read this, you aren’t still this perfect person all the time. I hope you get to be real, finally.”
“Der Foootur Slf,” Toby had written. He’d been four years old, and still in possession of his fully functioning brain, when he wrote the note he now read out loud, grinning. “I hop u get gotes. I hop u r hapy.”
“And I am!” he called out, hearing this. “And I did.”
Eleanor danced. With Al, with Louise, with Teresa’s father, José, and with Sal Perrone, who asked how long she was going to be in town.
She had thought about asking Cam to dance with her, as parents of the groom, but having seen the difficulty with which he’d made his way to the microphone earlier—Cam, the one of the Yellow Jackets who used to get around the bases faster than anyone—it seemed to Eleanor that he was in no small amount of pain. Dancing to some hip-hop song was the last thing he needed. And truthfully, she didn’t have any desire for that, either, though when they played “Teach Your Children,” she had to step out of the tent for a moment. That song always got to her.
. . . just look at them and sigh, and know they love you.
She looked out to the field—the peach tree they’d planted, the woods where the lady’s slippers came up every year, the cornflowers. When she turned around, he was standing there. Cam.
“Most of what the kids like nowadays isn’t our kind of music, I guess,” he said. “I bet the young ones never heard of Crosby, Stills and Nash.”
“I’m sorry about the house,” she told him. “The tree.”
“Nothing stays the same forever,” he said. “If there’s one thing life has taught me, it’s that.”
“You probably aren’t up for a walk,” she said. It was a question.
“The waterfall? I could handle that.”
100.
You Who Are on the Road
It was a stretch of road Eleanor must have traveled a thousand times over the years: first, alone, when she’d just bought the house, with her sketchbook and her pencils, setting off to draw, then pregnant that first time, and after, with Alison buckled into her Snugli and Sally following alongside, wagging.
When Ursula came along, they’d bought a stroller. Eleanor had studied the fancy model in a catalog and dreamed about getting it, the way some women dreamed about jewelry or cars.
All they could afford at the time was a very cheap one—the old umbrella style, which was difficult to push over a road as bumpy as this one, so bumpy in fact that often Cam just picked the whole thing up—stroller, baby, and all—and carried it the last stretch of road to the waterfall. She could see him now—his long, strong first baseman’s arms holding the sides of the flimsy stroller, with Alison bundled into her bunny suit, strapped into the seat, her face serious, even then. Cam had lifted her over his head like an Olympian showing off his trophy to the crowd. Just look what we made. A person.
Once they were old enough, the children made the trip to the waterfall on their own steam—talking about that day’s events as they made their way down the road, Toby skipping ahead, looking for turtles and efts, interesting rocks—the three of them singing the Seven Dwarfs’ song from Snow White. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.
When they got close to the place where the brook raced over the boulders—the water so loud in the weeks of first runoff that you had to yell to be heard—Eleanor made sure they held each other’s hands.
“That’s close enough,” she’d call out. Toby, in particular, was always pushing the limits.
They’d stand together on the stone arch bridge—two hundred years old, built without mortar, the stones held in place by simple tension, one rock against another—and sometimes they threw pebbles in and sometimes a penny, making a wish.
“I wish nobody ever had to die,” Alison said one time.
“I wish my dolls could talk to me.” This was Ursula.
Toby wanted to fly. That, and talk to God, or Mr. T.
Over all those years of trips to the waterfall—even holding tightly to their hands as she always did—Eleanor had to fight the terror of seeing a child of hers standing there by the edge. The pictures that came to mind could drive you crazy, the pictures of what could happen.
You had to let your children venture out in the world. You couldn’t always find the Barbie shoe. Children had to know pain, or how would they ever know what to do when they encountered it? Trouble would come, no matter what. The best you could do was to raise your children in such a way that when trouble found them—as it would—they’d be able to survive it.
Teach your children well.
Here was what Eleanor had learned, over the years since she’d wept over a chicken pox scab on her daughter’s scalp and the bald spot it left there, believing that event qualified as a heartbreak:
The worst things, the ones that actually got you, were almost never the ones you spent your time worrying about. In all those years, nobody ever fell over the edge of the waterfall onto the rocks. That never happened, but plenty more did. So much else fell apart. So much floated away. So much had been broken.
Her son had incurred a brain injury in eight inches of water. Her best friend was murdered while filling up her gas tank. One daughter had stopped speaking to her—and that was the easy daughter, the one she could least imagine shutting her mother out of her life, the most considerate, the sweetest. At the time, Eleanor had not believed she could survive it when Al had spoken the words that day in the car—“We’ll never forgive you. We’ll hate you for the rest of our lives.” Then Ursula: “You aren’t welcome in my child’s life.”
I wish I had a river I could skate away on.
A person can survive a lot, it turned out. Those things change you. But you carry on. Toby had not become a violinist, or a geologist, or a swimmer of the English Channel, or a notorious diamond thief. He practiced yoga and took care of chickens and goats. Coco, the onetime queen of cartwheels, whose mother used to worry she’d tear a ligament on the uneven parallel bars, walked with a cane now, thanks to a collision on the highway between Timmy Pouliot’s Harley and an eighteen-wheeler. The farm Eleanor had believed she would live on for the rest of her days was Cam’s now. The house she’d loved, rubble.
Now here they were, just the two of them again. They had swum naked in this place once. They had conceived a baby here. Here was the place they’d launched their boats. Here was where Eleanor first met Timmy Pouliot, with a freshly caught trout in his cooler, and Darla. Here was where Eleanor had witnessed the sight of her husband locked in an embrace with their babysitter.
Cam walked very slowly now, almost as slowly as their children had when taking their first steps. Now he reached for her hand.
“I’ve got cancer,” he told her. “It’s not good.”
The news hit her like a punch.
She turned her face to the racing water. Even now, in midsummer, it crashed over the rocks, but somewhere, a mile beyond this place, or three miles, or five—beyond the old people sitting in their cars listening to the radio, beyond the men with their fishing poles, conferring among themselves on whether the Red Sox had a chance in the playoffs, and the young couples kissing or smoking weed, and the mothers nursing babies; beyond the teenagers daring each other to jump off the rocks, and the ones, like Eleanor and Cam, just standing there taking it all in—all those human beings, figuring out how to live their lives the best they knew; count the ways—the brook would keep on running. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but the water never stopped moving. It flowed all the way to the dam in town, and beyond that to the river, which flowed to the ocean, which reached far as the horizon, and even farther than that.
Somewhere along this stretch of water, in among the rocks and weeds, so deep under you’d never see them, slept the cork people.
“I could take care of you,” Eleanor said to the man who used to be her husband. “That might be a good idea.”
They headed up the hill then. No house there anymore, but home.
Acknowledgments
Writing is a lonely occupation. When a writer completes a novel, or a draft of one, there is little she wants more than to hear the voice of someone she respects and trusts, offering up a response. This time, I was fortunate that a number of such readers and friends were willing to read my work—in several cases, in far rougher form than the one between these covers now. Large measures of gratitude go to Roland Merullo, Stephen Tolkin, Jane Miller, Helaine Banner, Peggy Cappy, Jordan Moffet, Kari Olivier, Peggy Cook, and my treasured lifelong reader and friend Graf Mouen.
The final revision on this novel was completed during the early months of the pandemic, where I had the great good fortune to be sequestered at my home on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, with two writing students whom I’d invited to stay with me for what turned out to be six rich and extraordinarily productive months. Every evening, after a long day of work and a good dinner, we sat outdoors under the stars—looking out to a volcano and a lake—while I read out loud to them from this novel. These two young women offered invaluable suggestions—and (most precious of all) the gift of caring deeply about my characters. For this and so much more, my gratitude and love to XiRen Wang and Jenny Allsopp.
I want to thank Nat Stratton Clark and his mother, Jules Layman, for their generosity, guidance, and insight into the experience of gender transition, and that of being the parent of an adult child who makes this brave life decision. I wanted to include, in a novel about many aspects of family life and parenthood, the story of the transition of a child once perceived as a daughter to the person he knows himself to have been all along, a son, and to do so in a way that portrayed this situation not as a problem but rather, a liberation.
My thanks, also, to Nicole Tourtelot for her multiple readings of this book in its many stages; to Maria Massie, for her guidance and support; to Laurie Fox; and to Judi Farkas, for once again sharing her deeply insightful comments on the manuscript in ways that significantly transformed it. As always, I owe a debt to my longtime editor, Jennifer Brehl, who believed in me as a fiction writer at a time when I needed that faith and support most, and always inspires me to work harder, go deeper. I had the great pleasure of working with the terrific team at William Morrow—Nate Lanman, Stephanie Vallejo, Tavia Kowalchuk, and Eliza Rosenberry. I could not ask for better support or more thought and care given to my work.
For more than forty years, I have been the beneficiary of a precious gift in the form of readers who stand in line at my readings (or used to, in the days when writers still got to give readings, and readers got to attend them). I have learned so much from readers who tell me how the stories I write relate to their own, or who write to me to share their thoughts and feelings about their lives.
In addition to telling my own stories, my life’s work has included helping other writers—and those still hesitant to call themselves writers—in the telling of theirs. To the hundreds of women and men—thousands, probably, by now (and I know your names)—who have trusted me with the truth of their experiences, I offer my profound thanks. It has been my honor to listen.
The readers and writers who are such an important part of my world have broadened and expanded my understanding of all the different routes by which a human being may get through her days and years, all the ways a person’s heart can be broken or mended, the forms loss may take, as well as redemption.
In a life that has seen the loss of some tre
asured friends, the painful end of my young marriage, the deaths of my parents and a beloved partner, I have been fortunate to have acquired at least one great gift that may not have come my way without the passage of years. It’s the ability to locate forgiveness—to offer it and humbly ask for it in return. For the lesson of what it means to forgive (to understand that there are seldom heroes or villains—just human beings capable of all the best and worst of human behavior) I thank every person who entrusted me with the truth of her or his or their experiences and was brave enough to recognize, in doing so, the part each of us plays in writing our family story. I offer this one as testament to what those who shared theirs with me taught me about love.
About the Author
JOYCE MAYNARD is the author of nine previous novels and five books of nonfiction, as well as the syndicated column “Domestic Affairs.” Her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, has been translated into sixteen languages. Her novels To Die For and Labor Day were both adapted for film. Maynard currently makes her home in New Haven, Connecticut.
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Also by Joyce Maynard
FICTION
Under the Influence
After Her
The Good Daughters
Labor Day
The Usual Rules
The Cloud Chamber
Where Love Goes
To Die For
Count the Ways Page 43