As I spoke, a memory swam to the surface.
I was seven, and my mother, Peter, and I were visiting Charles in the hospital, where he was recovering from his strokes, trying to regain speech and mobility on his right side. His face lit up in a lopsided smile at the sight of my mother, his great love, his betrothed. We had made his favorite cookies the night before, had rolled out and cut the dough, sprinkled the circles with cinnamon sugar. Now my mother was placing them, three in a row, on the rolling hospital table tucked against Charles’s belly.
“You can have as many as you want,” she told him, “provided you use your right hand.”
Determination transformed Charles’s features. After two weeks of hospital food, he wanted one of Malabar’s treats. He lifted his semi-paralyzed right arm over the target, lowered his hand onto the cookie, and dragged it to the edge, where it teetered precariously as he tried to grip it with a thumb that was no longer fully opposable. Cookie after cookie fell onto his chest and belly. My mother kept placing new ones on the table, and Charles kept trying and failing to grab them. Finally, exhausted from the exertion and clearly frustrated, Charles let his right arm drop onto his lap, where his hand landed on a fallen cookie. He smiled. Instead of trying to grasp it, he scooped it with his palm and plowed it up his belly and chest to his outstretched tongue. I still remember Charles’s victorious expression and how we cheered.
As I described the scene to Adam—proof of my mother’s love for Charles, proof of her deep humanity—I recalled the helpless-looking bumps of Charles’s feet under the hospital sheet. The thought of them, those two ghosts, made me tear up. Why on earth was I crying? I looked down. The story had gotten away from me.
“Trust me,” I said, regaining my composure. “Neither Ben nor my mom ever intended to fall in love with each other. My mother would never do anything to hurt Charles. Never. She cares about him so much.”
Adam stared at me blankly.
“You can’t control who you fall in love with, can you,” I said, repeating my mother’s well-worn phrase.
“I guess not,” Adam said, granting me that. But he gave me a curious look, one that in my paranoid state I took to be a judgment on my very DNA, all those chromosomes tethered to Malabar. “But you don’t have to act on those feelings. And you can certainly draw the line when kids are involved.”
I wanted to slap him.
“And exactly who are you to take the moral high ground here?” I asked my drug-dealing boyfriend. I felt an unbearable sense of disloyalty to my mother. Adam knew nothing about Malabar’s lonely childhood or how it felt to have her beloved first child die before her eyes, not to mention what it must have been like for her to watch Charles, the love of her life, go from vibrant to elderly overnight. My mother deserved happiness more than anyone I knew.
Adam started to speak, but I interrupted him. “Just forget it. Forget we ever had this conversation. You’re getting this all wrong, and I’m done talking about it with you.”
“I’m sorry,” Adam said, realizing how wrong things had gone. He reached for my arm, but I pulled it away. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’ve never heard anything like this before. I don’t know how to talk about it or how to help you,” he said, backpedaling. The look on his face was sincere. “I don’t know your folks, but I know that no one’s story is simple. And no single story tells the whole truth. I don’t understand their problems and I’m sure they wouldn’t understand mine.”
An understatement if ever there was one.
Adam plucked a ripe papaya from the tree beside our balcony and took it inside, giving me a few minutes to collect myself. He returned and lowered a plate in front of me, the papaya sliced in half, glassy orange, the black seeds scooped out. A peace offering.
“I’m sorry, babe.”
I studied the fruit. “Can we just forget we ever had this conversation?” I asked.
“What conversation?” And with that conspiratorial question, his whole face lit up, his eyes crinkling with relief.
I felt a deep sting of affection for him. We’d made it safely to the other side of our first fight. It was as if I were standing outside of time and place. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to take care of. I ate a spoonful of papaya, which tasted earthy and ripe, like morning breath, only sweet. The light was beautiful; the coffee strong. Gone was my need to understand what mattered and what motivated people. With Adam, I felt moments of contentment I’d never previously known.
* * *
When I decided to leave Hawaii for the rest of my haphazard adventure, Adam opted to tag along. For the better part of six months, Adam and I cruised the contiguous states, exploring one natural wonder after the next: the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. In postcards to friends and family, I wrote that Adam and I were intrepid travelers, wanderers who were studying life in America. Hell, we were practically anthropologists.
My journals revealed something closer to the truth: We were every bit as aimless and undirected as we’d been in Maui, arriving at landmarks and monuments as often by accident as by intention. We stayed in highway motels, played pool in grungy bars, followed dubious people into back alleys to buy weed. Daily, I placed myself in situations a hairsbreadth away from real danger, some part of me embracing the notion that a misstep could chart my future as much as college ever would. And it was the tension between wanting to escape my old life and getting caught in my new one that kept me careening from one small town to the next in search of God knows what.
My mother and I spoke every Sunday afternoon. The second I heard the delight in her voice—“Rennie!”—I was right back in Massachusetts with her, immediately drawn into the familiar intimacy, intoxicated by the secrets and hidden perils of her life. Despite all my risky behavior, Malabar’s affair still had me beat for excitement, still gave me the biggest rush. Her antics were more thrilling than anything that ever happened to me on the road. Plus, no matter how far from her I was, when things got bad my mother turned to me for advice. I lived for the adrenaline kick of those moments. With Malabar, I was still the accomplice, the girl behind the wheel of the getaway car, revving the engine outside the bank, ready to drop it into gear as soon as she came running.
“We had a close call this week,” my mother said quietly into the phone. “You would have died. Ben and I were in the pantry kissing, and out of nowhere, Lily materialized in the doorway behind him.”
“Tell me everything,” I said. I could picture the scene right down to the angle of my mother’s body, how she likely steadied herself with a hand on the shelf where she kept the pasta. I might as well have been in the pantry with them.
“I don’t think she saw the kiss,” my mother said, “but Ben’s hands were definitely holding my face.”
“Jesus,” I said and took a deep breath, trying to slow my racing heart. “What did you do?”
“Well, if you can believe it, I froze,” my mother said. “But Ben was brilliant. He tilted my head up and told Lily I had something in my eye. ‘You’re blocking the light, Lily,’ he said to her. I mean, Rennie, the man had the gall to sound irritated.” My mother laughed.
“And then what?”
“He told her to find some eye rinse and she scooted off to do his bidding. You know Lily. Such an obedient wife,” my mother said contemptuously.
“What about Charles?” I asked. The pantry was just fifteen feet from where he must have been sitting.
“Oh, Charles was fine. He’s always buried in a book. He didn’t see a thing.”
I wondered what he might have heard. “Why can’t you guys hold off until you’re alone?” I asked sternly. “Seriously, Mom.”
“A fire needs air, sweetheart,” my mother said. “Besides, I’m getting tired of waiting. I need out of this life.” And then, after a long pause, she added, “I miss you. I wish you’d come home.”
From the pay phone, I looked across the road at Adam. Leaning against th
e car in worn blue jeans and old T-shirt, his hair disheveled, a Marlboro Red hanging from his lips, my boyfriend looked like a blond James Dean, only grimier. He was twenty-five to my eighteen, a high-school dropout who hadn’t held a real job in years, a smalltime drug dealer.
At least I wasn’t looking to be rescued like my mother was, I thought. Adam didn’t have money, prestige, or even the slight promise of a future, and yet I was in love with him. The very idea of this made me feel superior to Malabar, made me think that I was capable of a purer kind of love. Adam can offer me nothing. Proof that I’m in this for love, I wrote in my journal that night.
My mother and Ben were more than three years into their affair, and neither of their spouses seemed the worse for it. A few months earlier, however, it had been discovered that Charles had a brain aneurysm. “A ticking time bomb” was how my mother described it. But as the surgery was risky, she and the doctors had opted to wait and monitor it. Charles was not told. At some point, the aneurysm would become too large to ignore, but for now, my stepfather remained unchanged—weakened from his strokes, but still vibrant in his own ways. And Lily’s decline, if it could be described as such, was barely discernible. If those radiation pellets, now forty years in her chest, were ravaging her organs, there was scant external evidence—except for her voice, of course, ever scratchier and weaker. No one’s death appeared to be imminent, that was for sure, and my mother’s patience for the long game was wearing thin.
“I’ll be home soon, Mom,” I promised.
“Good,” she said. “Remember, we are two halves of one whole. I’m not complete without you. I need my best friend back.”
I looked at Adam, who had opened a map and spread it out on the hood. I wondered where we’d spend the night. I longed for a strong drink, the kind my mother would make to take the edge off, something that would burn going down, loosen my limbs and cloud my mind.
Nine
I was eighteen when I returned home to Cape Cod in July of 1984, slightly over a year after I’d left. Despite the intentional distance I’d put between my mother and me, when I drove up and saw her waiting for me on the back porch, I scrambled out of the car without turning the motor off, forgetting about Adam in the passenger seat. I fell into her arms and rested my head on her shoulder, where time collapsed and I felt the ineffable sense of being home and in a safe and familiar sanctuary.
“Please don’t ever do that again, Rennie. I felt like I was missing a limb without you,” my mother whispered, planting kisses all over my face, on my cheeks and nose and forehead. “A whole year? What were you possibly thinking?”
“I’ve missed you so much, Mom.”
I was relieved to find that we still fit together in the exact same way. At five feet eight inches, I had reached my final height, but my mother remained an inch taller, so her arms wrapped around my shoulders and mine fit snugly below, around her waist. In this way, she was still the mother, the one who held, and I was still the child, the one being held.
“Are things going okay?” I asked, my arms still around her. I didn’t want to let her go. “How’s Charles? Have you been getting enough time with Ben?”
Her body shifted, became heavier.
“It keeps getting harder,” she said, her voice catching. “Some days I have trouble believing that it will ever work out.”
It had been four years since Ben first kissed my mother, fifteen hundred days, thirty-five thousand hours. For more than twelve million minutes, my mother had been desperately in love with someone she wasn’t sure she would ever have. She walked the fine line between projection and possibility, hoping against hope.
“It’ll be okay, Mom,” I said, giving her a final tight squeeze before we released each other. “I just know it will. You and Ben deserve each other.”
“You always say just what I need to hear, Rennie. Thank you,” she said, taking a step back and looking at the whole of me. I imagined that I looked pretty much as I always had, blond and healthy, perhaps a few pounds heavier from a diet of roadside-diner food.
Adam came over to say an awkward hello to my mother, whom he’d met during a brief visit we made to Boston to collect my car. She’d been unimpressed by him then and looked equally unenthusiastic about him now. “Why don’t you unpack the car,” I said to him, squeezing his arm.
My mother and I settled on a bench on the porch and picked up as if no time had passed. She caught me up on Peter and Charles and then leaned in. “Now, don’t be mad at me, sweetie,” she said, “but I confided in a few more people while you were gone. I just had to. I was going crazy without you here. I needed someone to talk to.”
My alarm was instantaneous. Malabar had promised she wouldn’t let her secret go beyond me and her best friend, Brenda. We both knew the potential dangers of widening that circle.
I felt a familiar tightness gather in my gut, a stomachache forming. “What? What do you mean? Who else knows?”
My mother started ticking off the names: Deborah, her college roommate; Matt, a former colleague from Time-Life Books; Rachel, a friend in San Francisco; Nancy, a neighbor in Chestnut Hill; Steven, an old boyfriend; Suzanne, her cousin . . .
I put up my hand for her to stop.
My mother’s and Charles’s lives had changed while I was on the road. They had moved out of 100 Essex and into the top two floors of a townhouse on Beacon Hill that, fortunately for Charles, had an elevator. Although Charles was only in his mid-sixties, he seemed at least a decade older, his walk now a permanent shuffle, his brain aneurysm a looming threat, although he still hadn’t been told about it. If left untreated, the aneurysm would eventually rupture, killing him instantly. But his weak heart made surgery extremely dangerous. It was a lose-lose situation.
My mother had hired a caregiver named Hazel to look after Charles in Boston, giving her the autonomy to go to Cape Cod or sneak off to see Ben. Hazel was middle-aged, from Nova Scotia, and, according to my mother, dreary and jowly.
“She’s a simpleton, really, Rennie,” my mother complained. “But there aren’t a lot of people who want part-time work. It’s fine. And Charles doesn’t mind her. We only need her for a couple of hours a day to tidy and cook.”
* * *
My brother eyed me warily at our reunion and I became aware of a new distance between us. Peter had been transformed while I was away. He’d had a final growth spurt that catapulted him above six feet, ensuring that he would forever tower over me. He’d gone from boy to man and had a potent arsenal of new gestures, not to mention considerable charm, which he would very occasionally direct toward me. Like our father, Peter had a way with beautiful women, some of whom were my friends.
My stepfather, Charles, gave me a warm welcome and was sweet as ever, but his handsome face, more deeply lined than I remembered, looked distressed. He seemed to have sunk further into the world of his curiosities and was especially obsessed with the Whydah, that ghost of a shipwreck that had captured his imagination. In 1717, the ship was caught in a treacherous nor’easter off Cape Cod and went down. For years, the three of us—Malabar, Peter, and I—had listened unenthusiastically to our resident armchair treasure hunter as he waxed on about the pirates who’d captured the ship on its maiden voyage and about the spoils aboard that had been lost at sea. He had theories as to where the ship had sunk and how the tides might have moved the loot. He read book after book about it and shared details he thought might ignite some passion in us, but to no avail. We found his obsession charming yet easy to ignore. After all, treasure hunters, salvagers, and “mooncussers”—land-based pirates who plundered ships that ran aground on dangerous coasts at night—had been chasing this dream for more than two hundred and fifty years. Surely if there had been treasure to find, it would have been found already.
Neither Charles nor my mother put forth much effort to make Adam feel at home; it was as if they knew he wouldn’t be around for long and was not worth the investment. But Adam was also standoffish; he wanted no part of the everyday lies a
nd silences that had become second nature to me. Within a few weeks of Adam’s and my arrival, my mother suggested that Adam rent his own place.
“It’s one thing to shack up on the road, Rennie; it’s another thing to do so under my roof,” Malabar said, insisting she worried about what the neighbors might think.
The request to modify our living arrangement came as a relief to Adam. He had gotten a job as a dishwasher, and as soon as he got his first paycheck, he rented a dilapidated one-room cottage on Crystal Lake, just a few miles away, where peepers and frogs chorused nightly and lilies broke open each morning. I split my remaining time on Cape Cod alternating between two homes and two families, something I’d been doing my whole life, and waitressing at one of the more popular seafood restaurants in town, Sally’s Clam Bar.
Over the course of the summer, things cooled with Adam. We struggled to get along, but our differences were too stark on my home turf. And although we were heartbroken, we were both strangely eager for August to roll around, for me to leave for college in New York, for our relationship to get to its final resting place.
* * *
A few days before I left for college and made what I imagined would be my permanent escape, the Southers came for an end-of-the-summer Wild Game test weekend. They had been meeting regularly while I was traveling and were compiling their successful recipes. My mother’s best friend, Brenda, was also visiting. Brenda was the first person after me to learn about Ben. Like me, she had become enmeshed, regularly meeting Malabar and her lover for drinks at the InterContinental in New York City, the hotel where Ben and Malabar stayed during their trysts. Brenda had known my mother since they’d worked together at Bloomingdale’s in their early twenties. She had been a bridesmaid at Malabar’s wedding to my father and had supported my mother through the dissolution of that marriage after she met Charles.
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